Child-specific deprivation: insights from Italy

Abstract

The EU-SILC (European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions) is one of the main sources of data for periodic reports on the social situation of the European Union and the spread of the risk of poverty in member countries. In the national context, the reference population of the EU-SILC survey consists of all the households residing in Italy at the time of the interview, and their members. All household members are surveyed, but only people aged 16 or over are personally interviewed. However, the needs and living standards of children are different from those of adults, even within the same households. Although many of the household-level material and social deprivation items available from the core questionnaire are relevant to the situation of children, the accurate measurement of the actual living conditions of children requires the collection of information specific to the children’s situation and needs. To this end, in addition to the annual variables, the EU-SILC survey includes also variables collected every three years via a specific module on children. This thematic ad hoc module includes child-specific items on material and social deprivation, which made it possible to compute the child-specific indicator. To this end, in this paper we present the results of the child-specific indicator calculation for the Italian context – referring to the data from the modules included in the 2017 and 2021 survey editions, also showing which social dimensions are mainly interrelated with child deprivation.