Introduction

The previous two chapters have examined how income data can be used to estimate poverty (or the risk of poverty) and how those estimates can be refined by drawing on other information about the economic resources available to, and the financial pressures faced by, households with incomes below the poverty line. The approaches described produce fewer poor households but also provide more compelling evidence that poverty exists, and thus provide a sharper focus and contribute to a better understanding of the issue. However, their impact is constrained by the fact that the data used do not relate directly to actual living standards, do not embody knowledge about the experience of poverty and do not adequately reflect broader community understanding of the meaning of poverty.

An approach that incorporates these features is required to give greater credibility to the measurement of poverty. This must involve drawing on information that is generated specifically for this purpose rather than by applying arbitrary assumptions to data that have been collected for other purposes. Importantly, the process of producing such information provides an avenue for engaging with those who are most affected by poverty and disadvantage in order to access their knowledge and insights in ways that can inform the development of better research instruments.

It is thus necessary to engage directly with low-income Australians and those at the receiving end of disadvantage. This has involved drawing on the resources, experience and commitment of analysts and practitioners working in several of Australia's leading community sector agencies that provide different forms of assistance to those who are vulnerable and in need. The resulting collaboration provided a means through which the views of clients (and staff) of a selection of the services provided to those in need could be obtained, examined and understood. This produced two major contributions to the research: first, the interviews conducted with groups of welfare service clients were used to guide the development of a questionnaire designed to collect the information needed to identify poverty and other forms of social disadvantage using indicators that are grounded in experience; second, service clients were asked to provide the information needed to quantify their own problems using indicators that were derived from community norms and opinion.