The Experience of Poverty: A Thematic Analysis of Social Media

Background and Purpose: Research into the lived experience of poverty points to a challenging daily undertaking in the pursuit of life-sustaining resources, and reveals that people who are poor exhibit resourcefulness in this quest.  While much has been learned from in-person qualitative accounts and survey research, very little has been captured in scholarly literature from social media accounts regarding poverty.  Increasingly, social media is an essential way for people to connect about their lives under the cloak of anonymity provided by the internet. The purpose of this study was to better understand how members of a major online social media forum share and interpret their experiences of poverty and economic survival strategies. The specific research questions that guided this study were: 1) What are common experiences shared by individuals who identify as having been poor?  2) What is unique about the purchases and economic choices made by individuals who identify as having been poor?

Methods: Data for this thematic analysis were obtained from an online forum discussion thread, titled: “What do insanely poor people buy that ordinary people know nothing about?” Published anonymously (i.e. not by this study’s researchers) in January of 2015 on the social media site, “AskReddit”, the question solicited over 21,000 comments. The researchers constructed a dataset of the most popular 25 comment threads, which contained 12,233 comments. Data were evaluated for relevance to the research questions, resulting in a final sample of n=1,495 comments. Data were coded following an inductive thematic analysis approach using NVivo 10 software.

Results:  Informants in the sample overwhelmingly personalized the question by responding with what they or their family did when they were younger and poor, as opposed to what they think that others do.  The common experiences of poverty among posters were:  parental and personal sacrifice, generosity of others (especially strangers) and resulting gratitude, economic survival strategies learned as a poor child continue through adulthood, and the salience of identity formation vis-à-vis poverty.  The unique economic choices of informants centered on the learned abilities to acquire resources in creative and unorthodox ways, the conservation and care of resources, the dilemma between quality and price, and the sheer difficulty and environmental barriers faced when making economic choices.  Limitations of this study include response bias and inability to accurately describe the sample due to Internet anonymity.

Conclusions and implications:  While narrative accounts of poverty mainly focus on people who are currently poor, this study provides a synthesis of reflective snapshots of internet users who have been poor but who are no longer. Such an understanding of the lived experience of poverty, as well as the strategies used to deal with deprivation, is critical to the field of social work, as poverty underpins and intersects with our field in myriad ways.  Methodologically, this project breaks new ground by using social media data from AskReddit to understand the lived experience of poverty.