Childhood and capability deprivation in Italy: a multidimensional and fuzzy set approach

In the last decades, starting with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Children in 1989, children’s quality of life have received a growing attention in scientific research, as well as in politics. This work aims to gain insights into Italian children’s living conditions and deprivation of capabilities using the Capability Approach, an alternative normative framework for the evaluation of human development, well-being and freedom by thinking in terms of human functionings and capabilities. From a methodological point of view we present an approach based on a fuzzy methodology applied to data from the EU-SILC 2009 ad-hoc module on children. The use of this methodology makes it possible to preserve the richness of the data available from the EU-SILC survey, that include both monetary and non monetary aspects of children deprivation. To get more insides into Italian children living conditions we also combine the fuzzy methodology with the capability approach at a disaggregated level of analysis by three social economic factors (single parent household, household educational level, macro-region of residence). Besides the well-known Italian North/South disparity of financial indicators—confirmed also for households with children—our findings suggest a new duality for Italian children quality of life, given by the multidimensional domains of deprivation internal or external to children’s households.