Experience Poverty: the Voices of Low-income Australians. Towards New Indicators of Disadvantage Project: Stage 1: Focus Group Outcomes

Abstract

The research reported here forms the first stage of a project designed to develop new indicators of disadvantage for Australia in the new millennium. The research is funded by Australian Research Council Linkage project grant LP0560797 and is being conducted at the Social Policy Research Centre with the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS), the Brotherhood of St Laurence, Mission Australia and Anglicare, Sydney as Industry Partners. The research is drawing on the concepts of deprivation and social exclusion to develop indicators that can form the basis of a new approach to the conceptualisation, identification and measurement of poverty. A supplementary goal is to pave the way for a large-scale nationally representative sample of the general population that will gather new information on aspects of deprivation and exclusion and allow the methods developed here to be applied more widely, in ways that can add to the research base and inform policy.