Abstract
This paper applies a child-centric approach to examine the relationship between poverty, deprivation and well-being among children aged between 11 and 16 attending government high schools in New South Wales, Australia. Poverty is measured using children’s perceptions of the ability of their family to ‘get by’ while the consensual approach is used to identify as deprived children who do not have but want items that are regarded by a majority as essential for all children. A survey was developed after conducing focus groups with children and was completed by 2672 children attending one of 52 schools in mid-2016. The survey data were used to estimate the incidence of poverty and deprivation and the severity of both conditions was compared with a range of indicators of subjective well-being that cover overall life satisfaction, happiness, connectedness and contentment with aspects of schooling. The results show that children who perceive themselves as either poor or deprived (or both) have lower levels of well-being in all four dimensions compared with children to who are neither poor nor deprived. The associations between well-being and both poverty and deprivation are similar, which suggests that both have a role to play and that some form of composite (overlap) measure should be included in future studies of child poverty and disadvantage.
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Notes
The importance of gaining a better understanding of children’s perceptions of their well-being is emphasised by Andresen et al. (2018) in their Introduction to a recent Special Issue of this journal devoted to the topic.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) estimates that just under two-thirds (65.4%) of children attended a non-fee government school in New South Wales in 2017, the remainder attending either a Catholic school (around 20%) or an independent school (about 15%), both of which charge fees (ABS 2018).
It is noteworthy (but unfortunate) that Australia is not one of the 21 out of 34 OECD countries included amongst the 44 ‘teams’ participating in the Children’s World study, making it harder to establish its comparative performance in relation to child well-being (see Rees et al. 2016).
Ethics approval to conduct the focus groups and survey (described below) was granted by the University of New South Wales Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) under approvals HC15457 and HC15832, respectively. The same applications were approved by the NSW Department of Education’s State Education Research Applications (SERAP) Committee. A total of 7 focus groups (average size, 8 students) were conducted with students in school years 7 to 10: further details are provided in Chapter 4 of Saunders et al. (2018).
A Participant Information Statement that described the research was circulated to ensure that all parents, carers and young people were fully informed about the study and had the opportunity to ‘opt out’ if they wished. Parents or carers did not need to consent to young people participating, although they and young people could choose to ‘opt out’ of the research at any time before the completion of the survey.
The ICSEA score is based on two dimensions of each school’s educational advantage, the first relating to student factors (parents’ occupation, and parents’ education) and the second to school factors (geographic location and the proportion of Indigenous students). This information is combined to form an index that is adjusted so that it has an overall (Australia-wide) mean value equal to 1000 and a standard deviation of 100 (see Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, ACARA 2011).
There are some differences in the wording of the survey questions, but these are relatively minor and are unlikely to affect the differences.
The items shown in Table 2 are assigned an equal weight when deriving the deprivation scores discussed in the text and presented in later tables. Adult deprivation studies (e.g. Halleröd et al. 1997; Van den Bosch 2001) have explored the use of weights that reflect the percentage that regard each item as essential (preference weighting) or the percentage that have each item (prevalence weighting), arguing that to be deprived of items that are more widely regarded as essential or that are more commonly owned implies greater severity. This approach has not been explored here, although analysis reported in Saunders et al. (2019) indicates that the findings are not sensitive to the use of alternative weighting schemes.
Note that the focus of the SCHOOL variable is narrower than that emphasised in the literature on school engagement, that covers behavioural, cognitive, and emotional engagement (see Fredricks et al. 2004). Note also that two additional aspects of schooling (happiness with one’s school community) and feeling part of the school community are included in the variables HAPPY and CONNECTED, respectively.
The correlations between the four well-being indicators vary between 0.32 (between SSL and SCHOOL) and 0.68 (between SSL and HAPPY) and all are statistically significant (ρ = 0.01).
The ‘getting by’ variable (GETBY) is specified with scores of between 0 and 3 for the four response categories shown in Table 3, thus ensuring that a lower value is indicative of greater disadvantage as is the case with the three deprivation variables.
The tetrachoric correlation coefficients between the poverty and deprivation measures and each of the validation variables and among the validation variables themselves have the expected signs and are statistically significant (ρ = 0.01) in all cases except for the family pet variable, which is not significantly related to the subjective poverty, adult joblessness or owns a car port/garage variables.
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Acknowledgements
Financial support for the study on which this paper draws was provided by Australian Research Council Linkage Project grant LP140100840, with additional cash and in-kind support provided by the Office of the NSW Advocate for Children and Young People, The Smith Family and the NSW Department of Education. This paper draws on and extends analysis described in the project report (Saunders et al. 2018) and reflects comments provided by Jonathan Bradshaw, Bob Cummins, Elizabeth Fernandez, Gill Main, Gerry Redmond and two anonymous referees, but is the sole responsibility of the authors.
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Saunders, P., Brown, J.E. Child Poverty, Deprivation and Well-Being: Evidence for Australia. Child Ind Res 13, 1–18 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-019-09643-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-019-09643-5