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Who counts? Challenges and biases in defining ‘households’ in research on poverty

In an important article published in 2002, H. White made a case for mixed methods in poverty analysis and addressed a number of puzzles arising from conventional oppositions between quantitative and qualitative approaches. One of the examples was the relationship between household size and poverty and the related notion of household economies of scale. This paper revisits this debate and updates it with new contributions on the use and misuse of the ‘household’ in surveys and censuses, particularly in quantitative research designs. Indeed, there is much scope for improving the way quantitative survey designs treat the ‘household’ and for learning from qualitative approaches, especially in poor agrarian contexts. Some alternative approaches to the household and to sampling decisions in survey design for poverty and labour studies are proposed and their advantages and disadvantages briefly discussed.