The Contribution of Longitudinal Research to the Study of Women's Poverty

The aim of this article is to discuss some of the central conceptual and methodological issues which must be tackled if we wish to investigate poverty in a gender-sensitive way. The relationship between women and poverty is complex and therefore very difficult to reveal: the disproportionate vulnerability of women arises from the interaction of economic disadvantages in the labour market, in domestic circumstances and in welfare systems. The methodological challenge that emerges now is how can we reveal the gender dimension of poverty? Especially in the case of women, the life course perspective may offer a fruitful starting point: life course changes are more pronounced for women than for men both in the family and in the labour market. Thus, longitudinal data are required, since only they can efficiently estimate the parameters of dynamic processes in the social sciences