Poverty Research and Measurement: Making the Case for Consumption Adequacy

Abstract

Scholarship involving impoverished consumers and consumption is an important part of consumer research on well‐being. Investigations have looked at domestic (US) poverty as well as its global manifestations at the base of the pyramid. Together they form a body of scholarship with underlying assumptions about what scholars, policy makers, and consumer advocates believe constitutes being poor versus not being poor. While these studies have much to offer, ambiguous definitions of impoverishment guide their research, which also include choices among possible measurement instruments. To address this deficit, our article approaches the differences in research focus across constituencies, seeking to understand how poverty is both defined and measured within our field. Under the conceptual foundation of the consumption adequacy perspective, we advance a definition of poverty that is used to determine the lived experiences of material impoverishment.

Quality-of-life as chronotopefication and futurization: Subsistence consumer experiences in India

“…The plight of consumers living in absolute poverty involving excessively harsh life conditions on a global scale needs a renewed attention by consumer researchers (Hill and Adrangi, 1999;Hill, 2002;Hill and Gaines, 2007;Martin and Hill, 2011;Chaplin et al, 2014;Farrell and Hill, 2018;Schembri and Ghaddar, 2018;Chang, 2019;Hill, 2019). This task is extremely important because it is becoming evident that the global trends of hunger and malnutrition, indisputable proxies of extreme poverty, are expected to further increase in the future (FAO, 2018).…”

Envisioning a community‐centric approach to impact assessments in subsistence marketplaces

“…Possessing such a fine understanding of lived reality helps refocus the design and assessment of social interventions on core issues experienced by individuals and communities in subsistence contexts (Viswanathan et al ., 2012). A fully developed conceptual framework for studying poverty with “lived experiences of material impoverishment” as its basis is contained in Farrell and Hill (2018).…”

Reimagining the Global South: Consumer welfare and public policy insights from the United States' Gulf Coast

“…These measures have been augmented by more person‐centric indicators such as quality of life and subjective well‐being (Hill et al, 2012; Viswanathan et al, 2012). In contrast to income‐based measures of material well‐being, the consumption adequacy perspective is best described as a measure of the “availability of and access to a defined bundle of goods and services that are required for basic survival, along with attainment of human dignity and self‐determination” (Farrell & Hill, 2018, p. 783; Hill, 2005). This definition promises to provide more insight regarding the daily‐lived experiences of the poor.…”