Estrategias de vida de los hogares: perspectiva conceptual y metodológica a través de la Encuesta Anual de Hogares de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires

Abstract

The conceptual and methodological perspective presented in this paper focuses on the strategies of life, understood as the set of activities carried out by different household members to enable their daily and generational reproduction in its interaction with various processes (economic, social) and social institutions, depending on their place in the social structure.

Studies framed in this approach have identified a wide variety of strategies: the employment of its members, the restructuring of the division of labor, the expansion of social networks, changes in household size and composition, migration, changes in consumption patterns, among others.

The conceptual and methodological proposal presented in this paper has to households as the unit of analysis and develops a complementary perspective to the studies on income, with axis in the City of Buenos Aires. In particular, it seeks to understand the various ways in which households deploy individual and family arrangements for the purposes of his maintenance and identify its relationship with different macroeconomic contexts. Based on this analytical approach, it is proposed to classify maintenance strategies as broader conceptual computers, based on the specific thematic content block at the Annual Household Survey of the City of Buenos Aires (EAH) and analyze their evolution over time and relationship with sociodemographic characteristics of households. The EAH relieves information about 6.500 dwellings within which all households are surveyed and their members. It is a stratified sample survey of probabilistic nature and provides information representative for the total for each city and municipality.