SILC Module on Child Deprivation 2024

The Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) is a household survey covering a broad range of topics relating to income and living conditions. It is the official source of data on household and individual income and provides key national poverty indicators, such as the at risk of poverty rate, the consistent poverty rate, and rates of enforced deprivation. In addition to the core variables collected annually, the SILC survey also collect additional variables each year depending on the topic as selected by Eurostat.

The figures published in this report relate to the 3-year rolling module under the topic of “Children”, which focuses on child-specific deprivation items collected from the head of households corresponding to children aged greater than zero and less than 16 living in the household at the end of the income reference period (31 December 2023). The is the second round of this module, which was also collected in 2021, see SILC Module on Child Deprivation 2021.

Table 2.1 describes the child-specific deprivation items collected in the 2024 SILC module. Households with at least one child aged greater than zero and less than 16 on 31 December 2023, were asked questions related to these items.

Information on child-specific deprivation was gathered from the household questionnaire respondent, typically a parent of the child/children in the household. In households with more than one child under the age of 16, the deprivation item questions were not generally asked specifically of each child. Taking the question about child deprivation in relation to shoes as an example, a respondent with three children aged less than 16 was asked ‘Your household has three children under the age of 16, does each of these three children have two pairs of properly fitting shoes in good condition that are suitable for daily activities?’ Answer options were

• Yes
• No, because cannot afford
• No, other reason

Where the household questionnaire respondent answered ‘No, because cannot afford’, then the household was classified as being deprived of the item for all children.

Questions related to two of the thirteen child deprivation items (homework and school trips) were asked individually with respect to all school going children aged under 16 in a responding household. If a household had one child deprived (for one of these two items) and another not deprived of the item, then the household was classified as deprived of the item.

In this publication a child is defined as a household member aged greater than zero and less than 16 on 31 December 2023, as child-specific deprivation questions were only collected from households with at least one such household member.