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Although household income is a common way to measure poverty, for both adults and children, the complexities around using income as a sole measure of poverty and the mismatch between income and deprivation measures has led to individual deprivation or living standard measures to be included as additional indicators of poverty.1-3
Measures of individual deprivation or living standards are based on an individual's own assessment of their access to resources, in response to questions evaluating forced economising (such as whether a person has been without fresh fruit and vegetables because of cost; put up with cold because of cost of heating; not visited the doctor or dentist because of cost) and/or enforced lack of items that most people would consider desirable (e.g. two pairs of shoes, a good bed).1,4,5
Non-income measures of deprivation or poverty are useful because they can directly highlight how issues like costs of heating, doctor's visits, food security, utility bills, unexpected expenses, etc, impact on people's lives. In addition, there is only a 50% concordance between the lowest income quintile and lowest deprivation quintile in some comparisons of the two measures, meaning that deprivation indices are capturing different information about poverty than low income.1
In New Zealand, the Ministry of Social Development developed the Economic Living Standards Index (ELSI) as a measure of deprivation and affluence. Using ELSI, higher levels of deprivation have been shown in Maori and Pacific people, children aged less than 17 years and those on income-tested benefits.6 However, these estimates are based on cross-sectional surveys and there is a lack of information in New Zealand on the exposure of children to prolonged or persistent periods of deprivation. This requires a longitudinal survey that follows children over time.
We make use of the New Zealand Survey of Family, Income and Employment (SoFIE), a longitudinal survey which has collected information from a representative sample of families in New Zealand, including individual deprivation at three time points. This is a summary from key results presented in a recently published working paper.7
Methods
Survey data--This analysis uses 7 waves of data from SoFIE, which was an annual panel survey administered by Statistics New Zealand (SoFIE data waves 1-7 version two). SoFIE gathered detailed annual information through face-to-face interviews on income, household...