Fair Shares and Families: Children’s perceptions of material resource distributions and decision-making within families

This project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council under their Future Research Leaders scheme (grant number ES/N015916/1).  The research is concerned with child poverty in the UK, and the links between children’s experiences of poverty and their subjective well-being.  It will focus on how resources are shared within families, and on how different approaches to sharing resources are associated with child poverty and children’s subjective well-being.  The research employs a longitudinal mixed-methods approach, drawing on ethnographic and survey methods.  The objectives of the research are:

• To understand how children perceive the distribution of resources within their families, their role in decisions around resource allocation, and how these relate to their subjective well-being
• To develop a theoretical model of intra-family sharing and decision making, drawing on the perceptions of children while acknowledging the inter-relationships between children and families
• To explore the potential for longitudinal mixed methods research in the field of child poverty, material resource distributions, and subjective well-being
• To develop and test statistically robust and empirically valid quantitative tool(s) for assessing patterns of intra-household sharing and financial decision making among children and their families

The research is conducted in collaboration with project partners The Children’s Society1 and Leeds City Council Children’s Services2.