Is Poverty Geographic or Area-Based?

Abstract

A recent article1 appears to have introduced a new term into the public health lexicon. Poverty, it now appears, is a feature of geography. This is a rather interesting development from a linguistic standpoint. Because the English language describes many types of poverty, I took the liberty of conducting a Google search using the phrase “types of poverty.” The first Web site returned by the search describes two types of poverty: income poverty and nonincome poverty.2 The term “poverty” has also been applied to mental or spiritual health, as in poverty of mind or poverty of the spirit. In his book, Jensen identifies several other types of poverty—situational, generational, absolute, relative, urban, and rural.3 However, the broader frames of income and nonincome poverty form the context for each of these terms. In the parlance of Niccolai et al.,1 the term “geographic poverty” seems to imply that there is something about the social landscape directly connected to the construct of poverty. Poverty in itself is not geographic, but perhaps our operational measures are. In their otherwise admirable analysis, these authors seem to indicate that area-based measures of household poverty are associated with racial/ethnic disparities. Curiously, except in the title and the Methods section, the authors do not use the phrase “geographic poverty.” The term has never been used conventionally in public health research nor used generally in the social sciences. A better choice of a term might have been “area-based poverty measure.” It is unfortunate that the editors did not require the authors to change the title; now an unnecessary term has been introduced into PubMed and elsewhere and will likely be replicated as it metastasizes across the Internet, in popular media, and in the minds of health researchers.