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Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research 1/2010

01.01.2010

Structure of National Perceptions of Social Needs Across EU Countries

verfasst von: Paul Dickes, Alessio Fusco, Eric Marlier

Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research | Ausgabe 1/2010

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Abstract

Back in 1975, the European Union (EU) Council of Ministers defined the poor as “individuals or families whose resources are so small as to exclude them from the minimum acceptable way of life of the Member State in which they live”. This widely quoted definition leaves room for discussion about what can be considered a “minimum acceptable way of life” in different countries and thus also whether national perceptions of minimum standards vary from one country to the next. The paper explores this latter issue by exploiting the first EU dataset allowing a comparative analysis of the items which citizens in the different Member States consider to be necessary for people to have an “acceptable” standard of living in the country where they live. It assesses the (in)variance of the structure of the perception of social needs between countries on the basis of an extension of the multidimensional scaling (MDS) method, and shows a high level of congruence between the 27 national patterns. An important consequence of this result is that it supports the approach which consists of measuring deprivation on the basis of a same set of (validated) items across all the Member States.

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Fußnoten
1
Kangas and Ritakallio (1998, p. 167) put it like this: “Intuitively, everyone knows what poverty is. Poverty is deprivation and misery. Poverty also involves moral obligations: we must try to eliminate it. But as soon as we address the practical question of what the poor are actually deprived of, our definition of poverty becomes much less unanimous. What kind of misery can be defined as poverty? What should be done to decrease poverty?”.
 
2
External methods are based on the judgement of experts without taking into account the individuals’ opinions. In these normative methods, the evaluator has an “external” assessment of the circumstances of the individuals concerned. By contrast, internal methods are based on the judgement of the individuals themselves (e.g., the subjective approaches, consensual approaches and participative approaches). See Fusco (2007) for an account of these questions.
 
3
Another condition put forward by Mack and Lansley for having a social consensus is that the consensus should be achieved in the various social groups, i.e., that there should be a homogeneity of preferences within countries.
 
4
The format of the second question consists in asking individuals which items they actually have or not. When individuals do not have the item they are classified in one of the two following category: “do not have and do not want” or “do not have because cannot afford”. The rationale for that is to take into account the taste of the individuals with respect to the absence due to a lack of resources.
 
5
It has also been subject to criticisms, for instance by McKay (2004).
 
6
As rightly emphasised by Halleröd (1998, p. 285), “a precondition for such a comparison is that deprivation can be measured against a standard that has social relevance in each country involved in the study”. Comparisons between countries are made relatively complex when the cultural and socio-economic disparities are likely to appear in the results of the consensual approach.
 
7
For discussion of (material) deprivation approaches, see inter alia Dickes (1989) or Nolan and Whelan (1996). Back in 2002, Atkinson et al. (2002:123) were already recommending that "significant investment should be madein developing (non monetary indicators of deprivation) in a comparative context for use in the EU monitoring process". See Guio (2009) for concrete implementation of this recommandation.
 
8
The EU-SILC module was elaborated inter alia on the basis of an exploratory analysis of this 2007 Eurobarometer conducted by an EU Task-Force; it will include the same set of items in all the Member States.
 
9
This wording is slightly different from that used by Mack and Lansley (1985, p. 52), i.e., “On these cards are a number of different items which relate to our standard of living. Please would you indicate by placing in the appropriate box the living standards you feel all adults should have in Britain today. This box is for items which you think are necessary, and which all adults should be able to afford and which they should not have to do without; this box is for items which may be desirable but are not necessary.”.
 
10
It should be highlighted that this is different from the standard practice, in which EU-27 averages are computed on the basis of population weighted national results.
 
11
For this, we have used the ALSCAL SPSS procedure, with monotonic transformation.
 
12
The application of a basic MDS (without taking into account individual differences) to the data leads to a Kruskal’s stress of 0.16 and an rsq value of 0.88, which satisfactorily meet the usual standards.
 
13
If we accept one exception in clusters 1, 3, 4, 5 and two exceptions in the other clusters, the total number of correctly located regions is 207 (85%).
 
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Metadaten
Titel
Structure of National Perceptions of Social Needs Across EU Countries
verfasst von
Paul Dickes
Alessio Fusco
Eric Marlier
Publikationsdatum
01.01.2010
Verlag
Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in
Social Indicators Research / Ausgabe 1/2010
Print ISSN: 0303-8300
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0921
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-009-9454-5

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