page_title: Seebohm Rowntree
section_title: First York study (1899)
hierarchical_section_title: Seebohm Rowntree / Work / First York study (1899)
caption_attribution_description: English: Black and white illustration of Dublin Slum dwellers in article entitled The Last of an Historic Dublin Slum written by Mary Costello, photograph by Mrs. Charles O'Connor in The Lady of the House magazine, Volume XII, Number 143, Christmas, 1901, page 10.
context_page_description: Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, CH was an English sociological researcher, social reformer and industrialist. He is known in particular for his three York studies of poverty conducted in 1899, 1935, and 1951.
  The first York study involved a comprehensive survey into the living conditions of the poor in York during which investigators visited every working class household, and his methodology inspired many subsequent researches in British empirical sociology.
  By strictly defining the concept of poverty in his studies, he was able to reveal that the poverty in York are more of structural rather than moral reasons, such as of low wages, which went against the traditionally held view that the poor were responsible for their own plight.
context_section_description: Rowntree investigated poverty in York, inspired by the work of his father Joseph Rowntree and the work of Charles Booth in London. He carried out a comprehensive survey into the living conditions of the poor in York during which investigators visited every working class household. This amounted to the detailed study of 11,560 families or 46,754 individuals. The results of this study were published in 1901 in his book Poverty, A Study of Town Life.
  In Rowntree's work, he surveyed rich families in York and drew a poverty line in terms of a minimum weekly sum of money "necessary to enable families... to secure the necessaries of a healthy life" (quoted in Coates and Silburn, 1970). The money needed for this subsistence level of existence covered fuel and light, rent, food, clothing, household and personal items, adjusted according to family size. He determined this level using social scientific methods which hadn't been applied to the study of poverty before. For example, he consulted leading nutritionists of the period to discover the minimum calorific intake and nutritional balance necessary before people got ill or lost weight. He then surveyed the prices of food in York to find the cheapest prices in the area for purchasing the food required by this minimum diet and used this information to set his poverty line.
  According to this measure, 27.84 percent of the total population of York lived below the poverty line.  This result corresponded with that from Charles Booth's study of poverty in London and so challenged the view, commonly held at the time, that abject poverty was a problem particular to London and was not widespread in the rest of Britain.
  He placed those below his poverty line into two groups depending on the reason for their poverty. Those in primary poverty did not have enough income to meet the expenditure necessary for their basic needs. Those classed as in secondary poverty had high enough income to meet basic needs but this money was being spent elsewhere so they were unable to then afford the necessities of life.
  Setting a primary poverty line for which "[e]xpenditure needful for the development of the mortal, moral and social sides of human nature will not be taken into account'' (136) did not mean that he did not recognise the non-subsistence need of the working class. Rather, he wished to measure a type of poverty that could not be reduced simply by greater "thrift", so as to cast off the contemporary social myth about poverty as one's own fault. Ironically, this primary poverty line also helped many manufactures to set the lowest possible minimum wage, which engendered many criticism toward him.
  In analysing the results of the investigation he found that people at certain stages of life, for example in old age and early childhood, were more likely to be in abject poverty, living below the poverty line, than at other stages of life. From this he formulated the idea of the poverty cycle in which some people moved in and out of absolute poverty during their lives. This idea of poverty circle captured important longitudinal aspects of poverty that were cited later in many other researches.
caption: Poverty in towns, slum dwellers in Dublin, Ireland circa 1901.
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