To be poor and Appalachian: a mixed methods, multi-scale account of multidimensional poverty in the Appalachian mountains

Thesis

How ought Appalachian poverty be understood and measured? Through the lens of Amartya Sen’s capability approach, I consider the topic of multidimensional poverty in central Appalachia, a mountainous region in the southeastern United States with a long history of coal extraction. By combining participatory, ethnographic, and quantitative methods, I translate the lived experiences of my subjects into measures and analyses that are ‘legible’ to popular audiences and relevant to policy.

In attending to the experiences of my subjects, I traverse four conceptual scales that they deemed relevant to their deprivations: the household, the community, the subregional, and the individual. At the household-level, I construct a participatory poverty measure, trial it using a small sample of households, and leverage my results to assess the interlinkages between social relationships and poverty. Observing that the household perspective is insufficient to explain my subjects’ experiences, I propose a conceptual framework for estimating deprivations at the community-level, develop a community measure for my field site, and qualitatively trace how these communities have changed over time. I then consider the subregional, ‘mezzo’ perspective by studying the quantitative relationship between community disadvantage and remoteness, but I then contextualize these findings by considering the ongoing trend of Appalachian city dissolution through a comparative case study. I finally return to the individual-level by providing a qualitative, dimension-by dimension account of Appalachian poverty, thereby demonstrating the construct validity of my measures. In doing so, I consider how the deprivations identified by my subjects experientially and contextually interface with their capabilities. Ultimately, my research develops a mixed methods, multi-scale account of multidimensional poverty in Appalachia that is embedded into capability theory and human experience alike, while also responding to the region’s larger histories and social structures.

Authors: McQuillen, S

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-m8eyrgdwk
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: capability approach; multi-scale; multidimensional poverty; mixed methods; measurement; Appalachia
• Subjects: Appalachian Region; Poverty; Developed countries