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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Although monitoring and evaluating child poverty has been recognized as important,
there is little statistical information focused on children. Because the annual EUStatistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey does not include
child-specific information on an annual basis, this study proposes a measure of child
exposure to household material deprivation based on this dataset. The study considers
four domains of deprivation that have a direct impact on child development: housing
conditions, household financial capacity, household durable goods, and environmental
living conditions. Although developing a child-centered measurement of child deprivation is important, the EU-SILC considers the household as the unit of measurement.
Therefore, our proposal is household-based, allowing annual monitoring of children’s
exposure to deprivation—an important insight for social policy purposes to tackle the
problem of child poverty. Using the 2017 Portuguese sample, we applied graded
response models to assess the psychometric properties of the EU-SILC items and fit
separate indexes per domain and the composite index. Item selection was based on their
characteristic curves and information functions. The results allow for the selection of
more informative items for every domain to obtain the composite index. In general, the
empirical analysis confirmed the theoretical approach for item selection. The methodology may be directly applied to the full EU dataset or to each country individually.
Description
Keywords
Child deprivation Child development Graded response model Household poverty