Sociological Perspective on Child Poverty: A Critical Literature Review

The objective of this article is to comprehend how and from which perspective sociology focuses on child poverty and to explore the way it poses the problem. In this context, the article reveals the main contents and general character of sociological perspectives on child poverty and discusses the deficiencies, limitations, and prejudices of the literature through an investigation into which approaches are adopted and which themes are focused on. A critical literature review method was used in the article. Two approaches emerged: the structural and phenomenological approaches. Based on these approaches, some results were obtained. These were that, within the structural approach, a child-oriented research approach is lacking since the focus is on such factors as family structure, race/ethnicity, space/neighbourhood, gender, social expenditures/support applications. The gender dimension particularly needs to be considered as a prominent theme in childcare. The quality of the relationship with the social policy field is significant for the literature in terms of both social policy as an integral dimension of child poverty as well as methodological limitation and constraint- lack of childspecific statistical data production. Finally, our research concluded that the number of macro-oriented studies that have adopted a structural approach was not high because of the limitation and constraint of statistical data production in the literature in Turkey