Personal Accounts of Poverty: A Thematic Analysis of Social Media.

The field of social work seeks to enhance human well-being by addressing the needs of people living in poverty. Three billion people around the world use the internet daily, and 65% of them use social media. This article qualitatively identifies emergent themes about the lived experiences of poverty from people who reported either being poor or having have been poor, using selected social media posts (N = 1,495) on the website Reddit. We found that the experiences of poverty bring arduousness and hardship, which necessitates an arsenal of survival strategies and skills. It was also found that some people who were poor experienced the saving grace of unexpected charitable acts, which eased their burden. Moreover, these experiences manifest in vestigial feelings and behaviors even when one is no longer poor. An understanding of the lived experiences by poor people themselves is a foundational task for social work educators, practitioners, and researchers.

Beyond Income: A Social Justice Approach to Assessing Poverty among Older Adults with Chronic Kidney Disease.

How social workers define and assess poverty is a matter of economic and social justice. Recent conceptual and measurement advances point to a multidimensional definition of poverty which captures material, social, and political deprivations. Using data from a survey, this article describes how nephrology social workers assess poverty among older adults living with a chronic kidney disease (N = 52). Results suggest respondents already conceive of poverty as a multidimensional experience, support awareness-raising about poverty, and primarily assess poverty by employment status, income, access to transportation, and education. Opportunities to expand poverty assessment in future work are promising.