A survey on poverty perception of household: Bartin province example

Poverty is a multi-dimensional concept which may be expressed as a situation where people do not have economical and social opportunities to meet their basic needs in order to be able to continue their lives. The poverty, which has been on agenda of the World since the 1980s and which has been a problem that should be solved especially in developing countries started to be included in studies of the institutions such as the United Nations and World Bank in due course of time. The concept of poverty has been an issue of agenda in Turkey due to the suffered economical crisis situations in the 1990s and because of natural disaster such as earthquake occurred on the same date and has been the topic of many researches since such date. One of the most important concepts that is prominent with regards to poverty is household poverty perception. Such a concept may be expressed as a fact that may be assessed as a multi dimensional one like poverty by means of subjective and objective approaches. The purpose of this study is to assert the manner of perception of the poverty concept by household individuals by means of subjective approaches. Questionnaire application was preferred as study method. Face-to-face interviews were held with totally 394 household heads who were determined by means of random sampling technique for such a purpose. In line with answers given by the people, it was seen that household individuals residing at Bartın did not generally consider themselves poor and while the fact that they were partially aware of multi dimensional structure of poverty was statistically found important and that satisfaction about living standards did not gain any value by gender. Additionally, it was detected that poverty in Bartın was perceived at the level of 27%. Keywords: Poverty, Poverty Perception, Household, Bartın.