Material deprivation and social exclusion of children: lessons from measurement attempts among children in Israel

Abstract

Measuring child poverty using a ‘poverty threshold’ has many drawbacks. Thus, this study sought to develop two alternative measures, a material deprivation index and a social exclusion measure. These new measures were developed and tested using data from the first wave of the International Survey of Children's Well-Being in Israel among twelve-year-olds. The results show it is possible to develop child-centered material deprivation and social exclusion measures that are valid and reliable. The measures can help policy makers decide on priorities and create policies that better meet the needs of children.

Child social exclusion

“…In contrast, material and economic resources explain nothing like the majority of the variation between countries in social exclusion in the other sub-domains. These results contrast with the Gross-Manos' social exclusions measure (Gross-Manos, 2015) where the measure is reliable only when omitting the participation in social activities dimension. That is because, as discussed by Gross-Manos and Ben-Arieh (2016), social participation is measured by involvement in social activities, whereas in this article participation refers to being listened and taken into account by the adults, satisfaction with how the time is used and also participating in organised leisure activities.…”

Hope, Material Resources, and Subjective Well‐Being of 8‐ to 12‐Year‐Old Children in Israel

“…Children with greater lack of material resources meant lacking 2–5 items (of 5) among 8‐year‐olds (23.7% of 8‐year‐olds met this criteria) and lacking 3–9 items (of 9) among 10‐ and 12‐year‐old children (24.5% of 10‐ to 12‐year‐olds met this criteria). Among 10‐ and 12‐year olds, the cut‐off point for determining greater lack of material resources was based on the suggestion of Gross‐Manos (), according to which a lack of three or more items as indication for material deprivation. For the 8‐year‐olds, no cut‐off point was suggested in the literature, hence a cut‐off point that created similar proportion of lacking resources, was chosen.…”

“…This is especially problematic when studying children's own perspectives on their lives. Therefore, efforts have been made to develop measures to evaluate children's material situation from their own point of view (e.g., Gross‐Manos, ; Main & Bradshaw, ). Many of these efforts have been based on relative measurements for evaluating children's material status.…”

“…Following this view, in the past decade the use of material resource indices to study children's material situation has developed significantly (Gross‐Manos, ). The Material Resources State scale (Gross‐Manos, ) and the child material deprivation index (Main & Bradshaw, ) both measure the material items children report having, together with their subjective perspective regarding money and things they have. Similar indices have been used in large‐scale studies around the world.…”

Child deprivation in Australia: A child‐focused approach

“…The approach described above has been incorporated into a series of child deprivation and well‐being studies conducted in the UK (Main & Pople ; Main & Bradshaw ; Main ; Smith & Main ) and other contexts (Swords ; Qi & Wu ; Wang et al. ; Gross‐Manos ; Chzhen et al. , ).…”