A new film by the Economic and Social Research Council explains how Professor Stephen Jenkins’ research uses data from ISER’s pioneering British Household Panel Survey to explore patterns of poverty, which can be affecting families over a number of years and inform policy makers and government.
The research, Changing Fortunes: immobility and poverty dynamics in Britain, uses data from the Survey, which began in 1991 with around 5,000 households – almost 10,000 adults, 13,000 individuals – who were interviewed again every year for the following 18 years.
Professor Stephen Jenkins explains how this longitudinal data can then be analysed to measure poverty over a number of years.
“One of the key findings that I referred to was that there is a lot of movement throughout the income distribution, so what that means is that the number of people who are touched by poverty over a period of years – let’s say four years – is much, much bigger than the proportion of people who are found to be poor in any given time.
So for example in Britain, the proportion of people who are counted as poor on the official definition is around 18 to 20 per cent – but if you widen the window out to four years, you get up to a number of around a third. So the perspective about the proportion of people who are touched by poverty is rather different from the one year picture.
So that gives us an idea that the social security system, broadly speaking, is not just about focusing on a group of people who are stuck at the bottom all the time. It’s relatively fluid, it could be you and I, so we need to re-orientate the system to be thinking about helping not just people stuck at the bottom, but all sorts of people, right up the income distribution – because we may have a chance of going into poverty, and coming out.”