Measuring Poverty Through Capabilities: Preliminary Results of a Research in Italy

This article refers to a research on poverty that the National Research Council is conducting. Poverty has been considered from a multidimensional perspective, taking into account, in addition to the traditional aspects of income and consumptions, also socio-psychological aspects, such as how people perceive their own socio-economic status, perception of impoverishing factors and social capital. Our aim was to suggest a way for "translating" into practice - namely "to operationalize" - the model of Capabilities Approach by Amartya Sen. As a preliminary step in the process of operationalization, we have focused on a specific dimension related to well-being and deprivation, namely sheltering, from the point of view of CA. We discuss the way we chose in operationalizing functioning of sheltering by combining material characteristics of the selected dimension and all its surrounding aspects fulfilling individual's wellbeing. We will also discuss the results of this process, that is the items we put into our questionnaire, and the choices we made during operationalization