CHILDREN AND POVERTY

Galli and Fassanelli's paper on "The social representation of Poverty: A Naples pilot study " offers interesting ideas for applying the theory of social representations to the study of poverty. The authors have used diverse strategies for gathering data (open a dclose questions, linguistic and iconic strategies) and have chosen children as subjects of their research. I appreciate very much the 'openness ' and 'fresh air ' of th research strategy intended by the authors to cope with the study of poverty. At the same time I have my reservations concerning some data displayed on the paper (e.g.. do all the data correspond to responses given by subjects or are they recoded categories?), some descriptions of the data (e.g.. "Looking at these data, it's easy to point out that rich children's lexicon is much wider and more articulate than poor children's one " (page 6) or "The most relevant data is that subjects related to a lower socio-economical status... altogether showed larger agreement o a wider amount of substantives in comparison with subjects related to a higher status " (page 7)), and some inferences made from the data ("Probably, agreement shown by subjects related to a lower socio-economical status could be explained with a deeper involvement in the "poverty object" " (page 7)). Anyway, despite these problems I think the paper arise