Measuring Differences in Living Standards Within Households

• Author: Sara Cantillon
• Date: 01 June 2013
• Published date: 01 June 2013
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12023

SARA CANTILLON University College Dublin

Measuring Differences in Living Standards

Within Households

This article presents a quantitative approach

used to investigate differences in living

standards between spouses within house-

holds. Adopting a specially adapted, standard

poverty measurement approach—nonmonetary

indicators—it explores differences between

spouses in terms of possessions and access to

certain goods and services and the control and

management of household resources. Using data

from a unique module in the Living in Ireland

Survey ( N=2,248 individuals) as an exemplar,

the article focuses on 3 methodological issues:

(a) the development of specially designed non-

monetary indicators to explore differences in

living standards within households rather than

between households (including the role played

by qualitative f‌indings in developing those indi-

cators and how focus groups were used to assess

and validate the method), (b) the use of multi-

variate analysis to assess the impact of a wife’s

independent income in ameliorating differences

in living standards between spouses, and (c) the

deployment of a mechanism for use in quanti-

tative surveys to record spousal presence and

allow measurement of any subsequent difference

in individual responses.

Conventional analysis of poverty and income

inequality tends to neglect what goes on

School of Social Justice, James Joyce Library Building,

University College Dublin, Belf‌ield, Dublin 4 Ireland

(sara.cantillon@ucd.ie).

This article was edited by Fran Bennett.

Key Words: consumption, gender, independent income,

intrahousehold, nonmonetary indicators, poverty.

within households, with little attention paid

to any differences among household members

in living standards or in access to and

control over resources. As the other articles

in this special section of the Journal of

Marriage and Family attest, the position

of individual family members is therefore

based on the situation of the household,

with the assumption (explicit or implicit) of

equal distribution of resources and equalization

of living standards within households. The

diff‌iculties created by this assumption have been

well demonstrated theoretically and empirically

(Bonke & Browning, 2009; Falkingham &

Baschieri, 2009; Lundberg, Pollak, & Wales,

1997; Phipps & Burton, 1995; Vogler &

Pahl, 1994; Woolley, 2003). The results show,

unsurprisingly, that the assumption made about

sharing can make a great deal of difference,

particularly to the position of women and

children. The crucial questions left open are just

how much sharing actually does take place and,

as a consequence, how great are the differences

in living standards among individuals within

a household. A number of different avenues

of research have explored this empirically in

industrialized countries (see Bennett, 2013).

An alternative approach to assess the extent

of differences in living standards within the

household was used in an empirical study

in Ireland. This involved the development

of specially designed nonmonetary deprivation

indicators, for adults and children, and of

questions relating to the control and management

of resources within households to specif‌ically

ref‌lect differences in living standards within

rather than between households.

598 Journal of Marriage and Family 75 (June 2013): 598 –610

DOI:10.1111/jomf.12023