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Income‐based studies of child poverty treat children and young people as effectively invisible and determine the poverty status of families or households on the basis of information that is provided by, and is primarily about, adults. In contrast, the consensual deprivation approach provides a way of developing measures that reflect the views of children about what constitutes poverty and can be applied to data that children themselves provide. This paper extends earlier Australian studies of adult deprivation by applying a similar approach to children aged 11–17 attending a NSW government high school. Focus groups were conducted with children to help identify items regarded as essential for all children, and the results informed the development of a survey that was completed by over 2,600 students. The survey asked about 24 items, 18 of which were retained after statistical testing, and these items form the basis of the deprivation analysis. The findings indicate that a substantial proportion of survey respondents experience either or both of material deprivation and social exclusion. A new Child Deprivation Index (CDI) is developed and used to compare the circumstances of different groups, highlighting some of the factors that are associated with higher levels of deprivation and providing some initial pointers to possible underlying causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concern over the reliability of conventional poverty studies has focused attention on the need to demonstrate that those identified as poor are actually experiencing hardship. This paper takes a step in this direction by examining poverty using a living standards approach derived from the literature on deprivation and social exclusion. Deprivation - defined as an enforced lack of socially perceived necessities - has emerged as a way of identifying who is missing out on what the community regards as the necessities (or essentials) of life. Social exclusion - which exists when individuals do not participate in key activities in society - has opened up new areas of inquiry relating to a lack of connectedness between individuals, the communities in which they live, and key economic and social processes. The findings indicate that many Australians face deprivation and exclusion in numerous aspects of their lives, and that those defined as poor in income terms are different from those who are deprived or excluded. The low overlap between the three indicators implies that they all have a role to play in documenting the extent of social disadvantage and helping to identify the factors that contribute to its various manifestations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]