Measuring Differences in Living Standards Within Households

This article presents a quantitative approach used to investigate differences in living standards between spouses within households. 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 nonmonetary indicators to explore differences in living standards within households rather than between households (including the role played by qualitative findings in developing those indicators and how focus groups were used to assess and validate the method), (b) the use of multivariate 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 quantitative surveys to record spousal presence and allow measurement of any subsequent difference in individual responses.Key Words: consumption, gender, independent income, intrahousehold, nonmonetary indicators, poverty.Conventional analysis of poverty and income inequality tends to neglect what goes on 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, Poliak, & 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.The methodological approach described in this article focuses exclusively on the individual situation of heterosexual married couples with and without children. The methodology used combines concepts and tools from traditional and feminist, quantitative and qualitative fields of inquiry-it uses a conventional measurement approach (i.e., nonmonetary indicators) derived from the literature on poverty while at the same time rejecting the unitary household assumptions that traditionally underlie it, and it uses a large-scale quantitative approach, but one in which the selection of these specially designed indicators was explicitly informed by the findings of qualitative studies. This approach thus substantiated, at a nationally representative level, the findings of previous qualitative research and allowed quantitative analysis of previously identified areas of interest, such as the function of wives' independent incomes and the testing of these for statistical significance. …