Poverty: facts and feelings
Poverty: facts and feelings

Summary/Abstract: The welfare state and related social policies brought significant novelties to the recognition and consideration of poverty. On the one hand, poverty was no longer considered the private matter of the poor but rather became subject to the generosity of the higher social classes. At the same time, research into poverty developed substantially. Such research began approximately a century ago with the investigation of poverty in absolute terms. From the nineteen-sixties onward, different concepts and methods were applied to poverty investigation. In particular, basic human needs in both the narrow and broad sense of the term as well as the subjective perception of poverty became the determining factors of these investigations. The notions of subsistence poverty and relative poverty expressed in terms of access to food, clothing and housing or in terms of money necessary to purchase such goods also frequently underlie poverty investigation. Poverty research in Slovenia cannot "compete" with poverty investigation standards elsewhere as regards either conceptualisation or applied measures. In this article, the author considers the objective and subjective aspects of poverty in Slovenia. She compares the social-structural characteristics of those who are objectively poor (using the average household income as a provisional poverty-line) and those who have a perception of themselves as poor reporting a lack of money to make ends meet. To perceive of one's risk of impoverishment subjectively, socialstructural factors have a statistically weak impact, which proves that the threat of poverty goes beyond social limits. By contrast, education and employment status significantly influence household income while gender and age have an insignificant impact on it. The author concludes that feelings about one’s actual living conditions bring a balance to merely measuring them by objective facts.

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