Research projects

Project CEMAPRE internal

TitleA measure of child exposure to household material deprivation in the European Union
ParticipantsAmélia Bastos, Patricia M. Costa, Maria Eugénia Ferrão (Principal Investigator), Marcel Vieira
SummaryAlthough monitoring and evaluating child poverty has been recognized as important, there is little
statistical information focused on children. Because the annual EU-Statistics on Income and Living
Conditions (EU-SILC) survey does not include child-specific information on an annual basis, this
research project intends to propose a measure of child exposure to household material deprivation
based on such data. The theoretical and methodological frameworks follow the open access article by
Ferrão, Bastos, Alves (2021). The proposal includes the assessment of the model validity in order
to its generalizability to the European Union countries. Our work 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.
Ferrão, M. E., Bastos, A., & Alves, M. T. G. (2021). A Measure of Child Exposure to Household
Material Deprivation: Empirical Evidence from the Portuguese EU-SILC. Child Indicators Research,
14(1), 217–237. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-020-09754-4