Confessions of a Poverty Researcher: My Journey Through the Foothills of Scholarship

ABSTRACT This paper describes the key events, experiences and ideas that influenced the author's career as a poverty researcher. He describes how his early disillusion with economics was replaced by a spark of interest in social issues and how his migration from the UK to Australia in the mid‐1970s provided the impetus to begin what became a lifetime focus on researching poverty. A period at the OECD broadened his international experience in comparative research and provided the basis for his appointment as Director of the Social Policy Research Centre in 1987. He highlights how his perspective on poverty changed to reflect the conceptual and practical limitations of a narrow income‐based approach, was informed by his interactions with other social researchers and shaped by his participation in national and international projects, conferences, organisations and policy reviews. The focus is on explaining how his approach to poverty research has been influenced by the work of leading researchers in the field but also by the ideas, expertise and practices of many colleagues and unofficial mentors encountered along the way. It is a personal story that hopefully has meaning and relevance to other scholars working on economic and social aspects of poverty and related issues.