Proceedings of the 45th International Academic Conference, London

HOUSING INSECURITY MEASURE, A DEVELOPMENT OF A VALIDATED SCALE USING HOUSEHOLD DATA

STEVEN HENRY DUNGA

Abstract:

Based on the literature analysis, housing insecurity does not have a universally validated measure or scale that can be used across societies and contexts to measure housing insecurity. The literature on housing and housing insecurity is marred with individualised preferences of what individual researchers or organisations appropriate to measure housing insecurity. This paper takes the first step of proposing a scale of measuring housing insecurity that can be adopted for any context be it in developed countries or developing societies. The paper recognises the economic thinking that claims that the tools of mathematics are not always appropriate in the analysis of social reality (Lawson 2015) hence cognisance of the fact that functions and calculus are not always the best, this paper still makes use of mathematical calculations involving weights and still relies on the development of constructs that can be useful in explaining the reality of housing insecurity. We ask the question, to what extent is the ontology of housing so abstract that the numbers can be misleading? It is argued in this paper that the conception of reality and hence housing insecurity can still depend on the mathematical tools to understand the ontology of housing insecurity. Going deeper this paper does not claim to belong to the pluralism, or neoclassical thought, but as anticipated, devoid of that discourse and make use and hence benefit from both mainstream economic theory and aspects utilised by the pluralist school of thought and hence makes reference to the ontology of economics.

Keywords: housing insecurity; validated scale; household; poverty

DOI: 10.20472/IAC.2019.045.011

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