Anti-Poverty Interventions across "Most Different" Settings: Considering Change over Time in Comparisons of Emotional Impact

Abstract

A comparative, qualitative study in the Global North and South provided ground-breaking evidence concerning the psychosocial impact of antipoverty interventions. This chapter offers a new look at synthetic findings from a targeted policy analysis and an analysis of interview data from two country cases from the study—China and Norway. The concept of biographical circumstance is used to explore the mechanisms shaping varying emotional impacts of antipoverty interventions (social assistance) in the two sites. Specific focus is placed on how intersections between personal biography and changing socioeconomic, historical, and institutional contexts led to receipt of the intervention and how this variably shaped emotional impact. The findings, analysed through an analytical lens that incorporates a focus on change over time, add nuance to and complicate earlier findings. The findings are methodologically significant to the project of comparative analysis more broadly speaking. Attention to the participant’s changing experiences over time and the historical changes circumscribing the period in focus in such a comparison also has the potential to destabilize the essentialist tendencies that otherwise might prevail given a snapshot comparison.