Authors

• Turunen, Elina (University of Helsinki)
• Isola, Anna-Maria

Keywords

everyday life, low pay, poverty, social exclusion, social security, standard of living, unemployment

Abstract

This dataset consists of 89 texts written for a writing competition titled 'Everyday Experiences of Poverty' in 2019 in Finland. The aim was to collect varied experiences of poverty and to better understand Finnish poverty. The writing competition was organised by a research team in collaboration with the European Anti-Poverty Network Finland (EAPN-Fin) and the Who Listens to the Poor? network. The data were collected as part of dissertation research, which was funded by Kone Foundation.

The participants were guided to write truthfully about their own experiences of poverty and to discuss new perspectives on poverty in contemporary society. The writers were instructed to write ten pages of prose at most. The competition was endorsed by many Finnish organisations promoting health and well-being.

The texts described everyday life in the shadow of poverty, the reasons behind poverty, and the effects of poverty on daily life choices. The writers also discussed different ways of coping with poverty and how poverty had affected their close relationships.

Similar data collections have been conducted before (FSD2413 Everyday Experiences of Poverty: Self-administered Writings 2006 and FSD2795 Everyday Experiences of Poverty 2012: Follow-up Study). The respondents in the previous studies cannot be connected to the respondents in this study.

Background information included the respondent's name or pseudonym, gender, age, area of residence, level of education, and occupation. The data were organised into an easy to use HTML version at FSD.

The dataset is only available in Finnish.