Assets and domestic units: methodological challenges for longitudinal studies of poverty dynamics

Tracking change in assets access and ownership in longitudinal research is difficult. Assets are rarely assigned to individuals. Their benefit and management are spread across domestic units which morph over time. And this dynamism means that any claim about changing prosperity must also include other important claims about how prosperity should be measured and the stability of the social units which experience that prosperity. The chapter reviews the challenges of using assets to understand poverty dynamics, and tracking the domestic units that own and manage assets. It argues that changing asset ownership can be tracked, but who owns them and how their benefits are distributed—and how those distributions change—remains key.