The Multidimensional Aspects of Poverty Research
The Multidimensional Aspects of Poverty (MAP) project was an international research project coordinated by ATD Fourth World and Oxford University. Bringing together academic researchers, people living in poverty, and those who work alongside them, MAP developed a new definition of poverty.
As inequality grows around the world there is a new urgency to the fight to end poverty. Whether it is as part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals or in ongoing debates over the social safety net here in the US, all of this work is dependent on a clear sense of what poverty is.
The Multidimensional Aspects of Poverty (MAP) Research was the US component of an international project conducted from 2016 to 2019 in six countries. In this groundbreaking research, ATD Fourth World and Oxford University worked in six countries around the world with people from a wide range of backgrounds. Here in the US, the research touched every corner of the country, bringing together people from a wide variety of backgrounds from California, New Mexico, Louisiana, Appalachia, Massachusetts, and New York.
An Innovative Approach
Most research on poverty is conducted with people in poverty as subjects to be analyzed. Their lives are to be observed and measured to understand why they live the way they do. This approach values one kind of knowledge – that of academic researchers – above the knowledge of people living in poverty and those who work alongside them. It creates reports and findings, and ultimately public policy, which is based only on a part of the picture. Yet policy based on incomplete information can never be successful.
The MAP project used the Merging of Knowledge approach to bring together people living in poverty, people who work alongside people living in poverty, and academic researchers on an equal footing as co-researchers. Merging of Knowledge creates the environment necessary for these different kinds of knowledge to be shared and for all actors to learn from one another.
ATD Fourth World teams have been using the Merging of Knowledge approach around the world for decades, and the results have often been remarkable. Whether it was in evaluating the Millennium Development Goals, or exploring the links between poverty and violence, the track record of the Merging of Knowledge approach is impressive.
The National Research Team
Along with using the Merging of Knowledge approach, what made the MAP project unique is that people with an experience of poverty were involved from beginning to end, not as research subjects, but as equal members of the national research team (NRT).
In the United States, the NRT had a balance of members who lived in poverty and members who did not. Also, the coordinators deliberately created a team that reflected as much as possible the racial and geographic diversity of the United States and that included members from both rural and urban areas.
The NRT designed research tools to implement the Merging of Knowledge approach in the American context, facilitated peer groups, and analyzed the data from their meetings. A total of twenty-three peer-group meetings took place, in Appalachia (southwest Virginia), Boston, Gallup (New Mexico), New Orleans, New York City, and Oakland (California). Following these meetings, the NRT presented its work at a national Merging of Knowledge session attended by peer-group participants from across the United States. The NRT is also the collective author of the final report.
The following list includes all members of the NRT. We are tremendously grateful for their support:
Maryann Broxton
Guillaume Charvon
Shawn Ashley
Donna Haig-Friedman
Amelia Mallona
Johnny Ocean
Julia Sick
Kimberly Tyre
Marlon Wallen
H. Yamasheta Wilson