The concept of quality of work includes both formal and informal employment, with particular attention to the safety and quality of work, as well as perceptions of autonomy, purpose and fair treatment.

As employment is the main source of income for most households globally, having a good and decent job is generally associated with being out of poverty. Additionally, employment can be associated with positive feelings relating to a sense of purpose and fulfilment. However, many jobs pay less than $1/day, are of poor quality and unsafe, with risky working conditions and little or no security. This area of research recognises that more data are needed on the quality of people's work, particularly for informal workers and the self-employed.

This dimension focuses on security from violence to property and person, as well as perceptions of violence. Violence undoes the development gains achieved in areas such as education, health, employment, income generation and infrastructure provision. Furthermore, it impedes human freedom to live safely and securely, and can sustain poverty traps in many communities. Violence is not inevitable to human interaction. However, people’s perceptions of insecurity do not always accord with measured levels of violence.

This research recognises that there is a need for reliable and comparable data on violence against both person and property, and on perceived violence levels, to inform our understanding of these concepts and the relationships between them.

Social isolation

The quality and quantity of individuals’ social relationships has been linked not only to mental health but also to both morbidity and mortality. Chronic feelings of subjective social isolation have an increased mortality risk comparable to high blood pressure, lack of exercise, obesity, or smoking, and can actually accelerate the ageing process (Cacioppo and Patrick 2008; House, Landis and Umberson 1988). Chronic social isolation is a predictor of functional decline and death among individuals older than 60 years (Perissinotto, Stijacic Cenzer, and Covinsky 2012).

Shame and humiliation

Over two centuries ago, Adam Smith (1776) pointed to the relevance of understanding not only the material but also the social dimensions of commodities: it is not only necessary to have a specific good, but needs to be a type of good that ‘whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without.’ Failing to secure this, a person ‘would be ashamed to appear in public without’. This has led Amartya Sen to argue that ‘the ability to go about without shame’ is a relevant basic capability which should figure in the ‘absolutist core’ of notions of absolute poverty (Sen 1993a, p36-3; Sen 1983, p332-3). Poor people and communities today continue to cite direct experiences of indignity, shame and humiliation as painful components of their deprivation, meaning that shame and humiliation also play a profound role in the daily lives of people living in poverty.

Following Amartya Sen, this research considers agency to be a person’s ability to advance goals that one values and has reason to value, and sees empowerment as the expansion of agency. Agency is of intrinsic and instrumental importance to impoverished communities: ‘Greater freedom enhances the ability of people to help themselves, and also to influence the world, and these matters are central to the process of development’ (Sen 1999, p. 18-19). A 2009 World Bank study of 60,000 people in 15 countries asked people who had moved out of poverty how they had achieved this. Seventy-seven percent attributed this to their own initiative (Narayan, Pritchett and Kapoor 2009, p. 20).

Measures of empowerment in different domains of life are therefore needed to support people’s ability to engage in and to shape development processes. For examples of how this can work in practice, see the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), which was developed by OPHI with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and the published paper that established that index.

Also, on the subject of empowerment, Natalie Naïri Quinn and Simone Lombardini published a paper in 2023 developing the Participatory Index of Women’s Empowerment (PIWE), an innovative measurement tool that reflects its subjects’ own perceptions of empowerment. This demonstrates the implementation of PIWE through a pilot application in the context of a quasi-experimental impact evaluation of an Oxfam project in Tunisia.

While psychological wellbeing may not necessarily be considered to be a dimension of poverty, it is a vitally important aspect of people’s lives. More internationally-comparable data are needed to clarify which indicators can be used to inform policy. Psychological and subjective states of wellbeing have intrinsic and instrumental value. They are a key component of the other missing dimensions proposed, as well as an end result of their attainment. Moreover, they stand to contribute a richer perspective to our understanding of human experience and values, and particularly the importance of their non-material components. OPHI's research on this area includes various approaches to measuring psychological wellbeing (happiness, satisfaction overall and by domain, and indicators of basic needs and of meaning in life). 

• In this paper published in the International Journal of Wellbeing, by Michael Steger and Emma Samman, the authors assess the indicators proposed by OPHI to measure meaning in life. 
• Another paper published in the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, by Emma Samman and Maria Emma Santos, explores how poverty status and transitions in and out of poverty have contributed to life satisfaction in Chile.

In April 2007, OPHI launched the Missing Dimensions project with a workshop that proposed five short questionnaire modules that could be integrated into national household surveys for inclusion in individual or household surveys to improve data collection for each missing dimension. The survey modules were then tested and revised. Visit this page for more information.