The phenomenon of poverty in sociology: factor and resource analysis

The authors of the article prove the urgency of the problem of poverty in contemporary Russia. Russia's transition to new socio-economic and political relations in the 1990s led to the crisis and deterioration in the living standards of the country's population. Sociological and statistical data show an expansion of the poor stratum and the increase of the gap between the upper and lower strata in Russian society over the past five years. The growth of poverty leads to serious social consequences: unfulfilled basic needs, reducing opportunities for vertical mobility and self-realization of individuals, the emergence of the phenomenon of «working poor», disruption in the processes of reproduction of the population and socialization of children in the family, the social vulnerability of single mothers, the lack of prestige of large families, deteriorating health, and crime. Analysis of the main theoretical and methodological approaches to the definition of poverty makes it possible to identify the causes and factors of poverty in the works of Plato, Aristotle, T. Malthus, G. Spencer, K. Marx, M. Weber, T. Parsons, L. Warner, K. Davis, W. Moore, O. Lewis, A. Sen, P. Townsend, P. Bourdieu, W. Beck, D. Bella, E. Toffler, M. Castells. The main factors of poverty are economic, political, vocational qualification, status, stratification, value-normative, socio-psychological, communicative, competence, institutional, adaptive, demographic, physical, production, environmental and climate. The analysis of resources, which is not enough for the poor population, makes it possible to identify such groups of resources as traditional and modern, external and internal, group and individual ones.