In this paper we take advantage of the recent availability of EU-SILC data to contribute to the recent debate relating to the Europeanisation of reference groups. Our analysis addresses both weak and strong versions of the thesis. The former proposes that common standards of what is an...

The development of conceptual frameworks for the analysis of social exclusion has somewhat out-stripped related methodological developments. This paper seeks to contribute to this process through the application of self-organising maps (SOMs) to the analysis of a detailed set of material...

The life cycle concept has come to have considerable prominence in Irish social policy debate. However, this has occurred without any systematic effort to link its usage to the broader literature relating to a concept. Nor has there been any detailed consideration of how we should set about...

In this paper we address the question of the relative importance of within and between country differences in income and material deprivation in the European Union in the context of recent suggestions that insufficient attention has been paid to cross-national differences. In particular, we...

In this paper we consider the consequences for measurement of material deprivation, consistent poverty and economic vulnerability of the shift from the ECHP data set to the EU-SILC instrument. Despite the restricted number of deprivation items available in EU-SILC, we show that there is a...