Conceptual Debates on Poverty Measurement: The Use of Qualitative Expert Consultation to Guide Methodological Decision-making in Designing a Multidimensional Child-Poverty Measure

Child poverty is a global concern which is usually not captured for monetary measures. Therefore, multidimensional approaches to measure child poverty have increased in the past decade. However, there is still no consensus about what constitutes multidimensional child poverty, how it should be measured, and which criteria should be adopted to identify poor children in a society. We discuss the opinions of experts in order to inform the methodological decision-making processes in multidimensional poverty measurement. We conducted thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 27 global experts on child poverty and poverty measurement. We contrasted the degree of agreement and reasons to include dimensions and indicators in a multidimensional child-poverty measure for low- and middle-income countries. We found agreement and disagreement about the inclusion of multiple dimensions and indicators. On the one hand, Education, Nutrition, Water and Sanitation, Access to Health Care, and Immunisation were the indicators with the highest levels of agreement. On the other hand, Safety, Child Labour, Access to Information, and Cultural Activities were the group of indicators producing less agreement between experts. We found that debates regarding decisions in the process of designing a multidimensional child-poverty measure were related to the theoretical perspectives on child poverty, the rationale of the indicators, the data available, and technical issues. In conclusion, methodological decisions about the selection of dimensions and indicators to measure multidimensional child poverty requires a critical reflection on the perspectives of poverty that the researchers use, the objective of the measure, the data available, and how deprivations can be operationalised.