Survival Strategies of Poor People in Mashhad City

Introduction :

Poverty is one of the biggest and long-standing challenges in the world and the fight against it is a serious problem. Many studies have tried to identify this phenomenon, discover its causes, and deal with it. One of the most important aspects of this knowledge is recognizing the strategies that poor people use to survive in poverty. Although recent global studies of the phenomenon of poverty have sought to identify it from the perspective of the poor themselves by hearing their voices, domestic studies have paid less attention to this issue. Nonetheless, the need for this knowledge is strongly felt in our country, especially in the current economic conditions, i.e., high economic fluctuations and hourly increases in prices triggered by direct decisions of the government in such issues as increasing the price of gasoline and its occasional interventions to enhance the prices of its services like water, electricity, and gas, political unrest and augmented economic sanctions, and economic consequences of the Corona recession and unemployment, which have caused persistent shocks to the poor. Therefore, adoption of proper survival strategies in a metropolis like Mashhad City with very large marginal areas involved in a growing population, inadequate distribution of wealth, and unbalanced development is very important. This research was done due to the importance of the survival strategies of low-income people in Iran and lack of research in this field with the aim of paying attention to the poor people’s life experiences.   

This study was conducted qualitatively. The data were collected via an interview technique. The sampling method was purposeful sampling and the interviewees were the poor men and women aged over 18 years and living in the suburbs of Mashhad City. The data analysis was done through thematic analysis. Also, Braun and Clarke’s framework was utilized to perform the content analysis. 6 steps, including familiarity with data, generation of an initial code, search for themes, review of the themes, definition of themes, and final writing and analysis, were identified by Braun and Clarke. In this study, 22 interviews were conducted. The interviews were first done through an informal approach and with the interviewees’ verbal consents. They were then written and the data analysis was started based on the mentioned steps considered by Braun and Clarke. Besides, an attempt was made to increase the research validity by asking the participants' opinions about the findings and interpretations made by the researcher. For this purpose, after each interview, a description of what was said by the interviewee was retold by the interviewer and the interviewees’ views were properly matched.

The analysis of the findings revealed that the main types of survival strategies used by the low-income people included livelihood-oriented support strategies, underemployment, education and acquisition of basic skills, severe decline in household consumptions, and occasional criminal activities. The main theme of the present study was continuation of a poor life based on the adoption of fragile survival strategies. In fact, the poor people of Mashhad City helped to continue their poor lives without trying to improve their conditions by adopting the mentioned survival strategies. Due to their instabilities and fragilities, these strategies were not resilient in the face of the current crises, thus putting a financial pressure on their families and negatively affecting their survival.