Operationalizing poverty through refined functionings: A pilot study in Italy

This article is about an attempt to study poverty combining innovative and traditional way of doing it. One of the most innovative and interesting approaches in this panorama is the Capability Approach, by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. This researcher upholds the idea that deprivation must be assessed taking into account not only goods but also individual's role, agency and values. The main complain that has been made to Capability Approach regards its being too much theoretical and hardly described by empirical indicators. Operationalizing Sen's Capability Approach, hence, is one of the most stimulating challenges in the recent research on poverty. Our aim was to suggest a way for "translating" into practice - namely "to operationalize" - the model of Capability Approach. 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 (following a traditional approach) and all its surrounding aspects fulfilling individual's wellbeing. We will also discuss the results of this process, namely the items we put into our questionnaire, and the choices we made during operationalization.