Adopting refined functionings in studying poverty: a pilot study in Italy

One of the most full of promise approaches to research on poverty is the Capability Approach, by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. The Indian economist upholds the inescapable need to approach this complex phenomenon from a multidimensional point of view; he further upholds the idea that deprivation must be assessed taking into account not only goods but also individual's role, agency and values. The need to consider aspects strictly related to the psychological sphere and hardly "observable" (like values) has entailed a strong. difficulty in finding empirical indicators in order to "translate" the theoretical model into practice namely "operationalize" it. With this aim we have chosen a specific dimension, namely sheltering, and combined its material features (following a traditional approach) and all the surrounding aspects that fulfill individual's wellbeing. We suggest this way of studying sheltering as a pilot work that might be applied to a broad set of further dimensions. We will also discuss the results of this process, namely the items we put into our questionnaire, and the choices we made during operationalization