Methodology
We’ve taken a broad view of poverty, in line with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s definition: “When a person’s resources (mainly their material resources) are not sufficient to meet their minimum needs (including social participation).” We also take a broad view of what defines a data gap, as outlined on the Taxonomy page. Overall, our approach is informed by the RSS’s vision for public statistics.
Initially, we identified preliminary data gaps by collating several hundred poverty-related publications by major third-sector organisations published since 2020. Given the volume of sources, for each source, we fed each of the reports into an LLM (Open AI’s GPT 4o and GPT 5 models accessible via Chat GPT) with instructions to extract quotes or other information pertaining to data gaps.
Each extracted piece of information was then checked by a human researcher to verify that the information was accurate and relevant to our project. That process produced an initial set of gaps that has been translated to this explorer. However, as this is intended to be a living, crowd-sourced tool, more gaps will be added over time via submissions to our form, which will be manually checked by an RSS researcher. Updates to this tool will happen periodically going forward.
Each row in the explorer represents one data gap. Information about each gap is given in the columns:
- Name: a headline statement of what the data gap is.
- Type of Data Gap: one or more categories assigned to the data gap following a gaps taxonomy. See the Taxonomy page for more information about the categories.
- Data Sources: the data source(s) to which the gap pertains. Where the gap pertains to a lack of data or non-existent data, this is marked as “non-existent”.
- Topics: one or more topic areas relevant to poverty to which the gap relates.
- Link: further detail about the gap, including a link to the relevant source (where applicable).
You can find more information about the gaps, including links to the source where the gap was identified, a quote from that source, and the research questions it was trying to answer (where applicable), by clicking on the “Details” button for each gap. The “Reports” tab organises the gaps by the sources that were used when collating them.
