In June 2010, European Union (EU) Heads of State and Government adopted a social inclusion target as part of the new ‘Europe 2020 Strategy’: to lift at least 20 million people in the EU from the risk of poverty and exclusion by 2020. One of the three indicators used to monitor progress towards this target is the EU indicator of severe material deprivation (MD). A main limitation of this indicator is the weak reliability of some of the items it is based on. For this reason, a thematic module on MD was included in the 2009 wave of the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey. This article assesses the 2009 EU-SILC MD data and proposes an analytical framework for developing robust EU MD indicators. It carries out a systematic item by item analysis at both EU and country levels to identify the MD items which satisfactorily meet suitability, validity, reliability and additivity criteria across the EU. This approach has resulted in a proposed 13-item MD indicator covering some key aspects of living conditions which are customary across the whole EU covering a broad range of basic (food, clothes, shoes, etc.) as well as social (Internet, regular leisure activities, etc.) necessities.

This paper proposes a new measure of child material and social deprivation (MSD) in the European Union (EU) which includes age appropriate child-specific information available from the thematic deprivation modules included in the 2009 and 2014 waves of the “EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions” (EU-SILC). It summarises the main results of the in-depth analysis of these two datasets, identifies an optimal set of robust children MSD items and recommends a child-specific MSD indicator for use by EU countries and the European Commission in their regular social monitoring. In doing this, the paper replicates and expands on the methodological framework outlined in Guio et al. (2012, 2016), particularly by including additional advanced reliability tests.

This paper examines how pa e ti g p a ti es popula l lassed as good are related to economic disadvantage, education, and time pressure. Using the 2012 UK Poverty and Social Exclusion (PSE) survey we argue that parenting practices such as reading, playing games and eating meals together are not absent among those who are less well educated, have lower incomes, or are more deprived of socially accepted necessities: therefore, political lai s of idesp ead poo pa e ti g a e ispla ed. Further, we suggest that the dominant trope of poor people being poor at parenting may arise because the activities of the most educationally advantaged parentswho do look different to the majorityare accepted as the benchmark against whom others are assessed. This leads us to suggest that the renewed interest in sociological research on elites should be extended to family life in order that the exceptionality of the most privileged is recognised and analysed.

The co-occurrence of different forms of malnutrition in young children is known to carry differential risks of morbity and mortality. Despite this, there are few, if any, systematic analyses of the prevalence of multiple anthropometric failures (or deficits) in young children under 5. This paper presents the results of the first such an analysis done on data from one of the poorest geographic regions of the world -West and Central Africa. Using data from the demographic and health surveys (DHS) and UNICEF's Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), the paper details the prevalence and patterning of child malnutrition using a combination of conventional measures and the Composite Index of Anthropometric Failure (CIAF) for the period 1990-2015. It shows the advantages of the CIAF indicator for gauging the full extent of malnutrition and the ability of an indicator of 'Multiple Malnutrition' to identify children under 5 with higher risk of mortality. It also shows how relatively little progress has been made in reducing the extent of malnutrition and emphasises the importance of tracking progress by looking at both rates and total number of affected children. Malnutrition across the region remains strongly associated with household wealth and education. Poorer, rural households are much more likely to experience malnutition, but the widespread prevalence of poor living conditions in urban areas has the potential to undermine any gains made in reducing malnutrition.

We present the first study of multidimensional poverty in Benin using the consensual or socially perceived necessities approach. There is a remarkable level consensus about what constitutes the necessities of life and an adequate standard of living. Following Townsend’s concept of relative deprivation, we show how social consensus provides the basis for a reliable and valid index of multiple deprivation, which can be used to reflect multidimensional poverty. We discuss the issue of adaptive preferences, which has previously been used to criticise the consensual approach, and provide evidence to contest the claim that the poor adjust their aspirations downwards.