The Invisible Poor's Phenomenological Narratives of Poverty

The invisible poor is an anecdote about the lives of a group of educated people in urban areas that do not seem to be impoverished. The invisible poor are people who have an income but no savings; they can just scrape by for three to four months; they are officially employed with a minimal wage and may have many jobs; they are geographically urban but live in the city's slums. The goal of this qualitative study is to gain a better understanding of the participants' meanings and perceptions of the phenomenon of poverty. The subjects of the study were university personnel; the sampling strategy was theoretical, and the sampling technique was purposeful. The data on the meaning of poverty were analyzed using theoretical coding and then placed into five main categories, such as the burial of dreams, a sense of shame, geographical stigma, chronic physical anguish, and poverty with a sense of powerlessness—the production of tame and submissive bodies. The analysis of the macro-background causes resulted in four conceptual categories: family and broken wings of flight, social acceptance of poverty, network poverty on the outskirts of the city, and institutional invisibility. The micro-causes included two main categories: the culture of poverty and sympathizing with friends.