What did Townsend use to measure poverty in the UK?
Via the use of questionnaires, Peter Townsend developed a new way to measure poverty in the UK which he argued was more appropriate and useful than the official measures. Townsend argued that the government of the day decided this measure based on their political views and how much money there was available to spend.
How many households took part in Townsend study of poverty in the UK?
Understanding Society has a large sample of approximately 40,000 households, which means that the robustness or accuracy of the statistics obtained is much enhanced and reliable information can be garnered for comparatively small subgroups in the population.
Who came up with relative poverty?
Joseph Rowntree in his groundbreaking study “Poverty: a study of Town Life” (1899) investigated living conditions in York and found 24% of the population were living in primary poverty.
Is poverty the same as state of deprivation?
Deprivation to many means poverty and is not an easy term to measure. Deprivation can be defined as the consequence of a lack of income and other resources, which cumulatively can be seen as living in poverty. …
What did Peter Townsend discover about poverty?
Peter Townsend invented the relative deprivation theory of poverty which placed the definition and measurement of poverty on an international scientific basis, i.e. poverty is defined as those people whose resources are so seriously below those commanded by the average individual or family that they are, in effect.
Who is Peter Townsend poverty?
Why is poverty a social problem in the UK?
People living in poverty may not be able to pay rent, leading to rent arrears, eviction, and homelessness. There is a “deep social mobility problem” in the UK which makes getting out of poverty particularly difficult.
Why is there so much poverty in the UK?
A significant portion of the population of the United Kingdom are considered to be in poverty under some measures of poverty.
How did Townsend measure poverty?
How did Peter Townsend come up with the measure of poverty?
Townsend argued that the government of the day decided this measure based on their political views and how much money there was available to spend. Another measure was relative income. It could be determined how a household’s income compared with the average income in a given area.
Why was means testing important to Peter Townsend?
This was the sort of means-testing performed by government to determine that people were entitled to welfare support or benefits of various sorts. Townsend argued that the government of the day decided this measure based on their political views and how much money there was available to spend.
How did the press report poverty in the nineteen seventies?
Peter Golding (1978) has said that media reporting of poverty in the nineteen seventies portrayed the poor as welfare scroungers living off the backs of others. The press portrayed people as having a comfortable existence living off social security at the expense of tax payers.
Why did Rowntree and Townsend think poor laws were wrong?
The Poor Laws were wrong because they encouraged the poor to be lazy and to rely on somebody else’s hard work to provide them with the necessities of life. This allowed moral decline to spread through the population. The result would be that both society and the economy would suffer.