Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The aims of this project were: to explore prevailing beliefs and popular discourses relating to the nature, extent and 'risk' of poverty and wealth; to investigate how such beliefs and discourses relate to people's understanding and experiences of citizenship.

Main Topics:

The dataset includes two sets of files: 1. Anonymised transcripts from discursive interviews with 76 working adults. Interview transcripts are complete except for the deletion of specific references to names and places as required for the protection of the anonymity of respondents, and data provided 'off the record' before or after the tape-recording of the interviews. The interviews covered: attitudes to wealth and poverty, citizenship rights and responsibilities, income gap between rich and poor, taxation, welfare benefits and charity; newspaper readership, radio listening and television viewing; demographic details; satisfaction/dissatisfaction with quality of life. 2. A simple database describing news items extracted during a newspaper monitoring exercise conducted contemporaneously with the above mentioned interviews. The items are identified according to three main themes - poverty, wealth and citizenship. The database is a coded summary record - please see documentation for further details.

A hybrid sampling process was used which involved drawing quotas of employees from different earnings bands within the workforce of a major employer and supplementing this through purposive selection of people with very low or very high incomes.

Face-to-face interview

Monitoring of newspapers for database