An index was constructed that draws primarily on psycho-social and attitudinal variables. The starting point is to understand respondents as they are reflected by their responses to questions relating to alienation, anomie, socio-political issues, engagement and connectedness, participation, and so on. These 29 variables are grouped in 10 'dimensions of concern' set out below.
The basis of the approach is to analyse the psycho-social space occupied by different people, and to use the overall scores to then run a factor analysis to see if there are relationships between variables that would be difficult to find using simple cross-tabulation; then to scale the scores, create an index of marginalisation, and then to analyse that against different variables to find out who is suffering low or high marginalisation.
we are not looking at 'poor people' and trying to see how they function in the GCR; we are looking at marginalisation– which can affect people in all socio-economic situations– and seeing who falls into its related categories, which by definition should include poor and non-poor, black and white, male and female, young and old, and so on.
Dimensions of concern
