They are essentially three minor variations on one core indicator, and are therefore treated as a single element in some other parts of this paper. The second three are aspects of housing amenities, and the last three relate more to household circumstances. We would expect to find strong correlations within each of these sets of variables, as well as their association with the indices as here. This would support the view that those with low income and few possessions depend on public transport and public housing. In concrete terms, they constitute a consumption category with a different life-style, which goes beyond just using car and house ownership as surrogates for income and wealth as in this analysis.
Poverty is a way of life.
This reinforces the importance of the long term sickness variable in Table B, and is a grim reminder of that most definitive of all deprivations. We cannot detail them here, but they are included in the factor analysis reported in a later section. As we noted above, it is not the extent of deprivation in itself that most concerns us, but rather understanding its patterns. We might therefore reasonably conclude that a major characteristic of deprivation is its location in two distinctive household types, those where there are children and neither parent has a full time job, or where there is a single parent. Perhaps most significantly, it is not so much that low social class correlates with indicators of deprivation, but that high social class correlates negatively with deprivation.