Breaking down the question

The directive is compare, and the object is a specific one: two approaches to explaining chronic poverty. The candidate must therefore keep three things in view throughout — the capability deprivation approach, the social capital deprivation approach, and the particular phenomenon of poverty that is persistent, long-lasting, and often intergenerational, rather than transient.

Compare requires more than describing each approach in turn. It asks for points of contact and contrast — where the two converge, where they diverge, and what each captures that the other misses. A strong answer is organised around dimensions of comparison, not a pair of separate essays stapled together.

The focus on chronic poverty is the analytical hinge. The question is not about poverty in general but about why some people and groups remain trapped in it over time. Each approach must be assessed for how well it explains this persistence, which is where the comparison earns its marks.

How to approach it

Define both approaches at the outset. The capability approach, associated with Amartya Sen, understands poverty as the deprivation of capabilities — the real freedoms a person has to achieve valued functionings — rather than merely low income. The social capital approach understands poverty as a deprivation of the networks, relationships, and norms of trust that give people access to resources and opportunities.

Then build the comparison across shared dimensions: the unit and locus of deprivation (individual freedom versus social relationships), the view of the poor (agents versus network members), the mechanism of persistence, and the policy implications each generates. Locate both within the broader sociology of stratification via the note on concepts of stratification.

Conclude that the approaches are complementary — each illuminating a different face of the trap — rather than rivals, and show how together they explain chronic poverty better than either alone.

Model answer

Chronic poverty — poverty that is deep, persistent, and often transmitted across generations — resists explanation by income alone, since two households with the same income may differ greatly in their prospects of escape. Two influential sociological approaches locate the sources of this persistence beyond the pay packet: the capability deprivation approach and the social capital deprivation approach.

The capability approach. Developed by Amartya Sen, the capability approach redefines poverty as the deprivation of capabilities — the substantive freedoms a person enjoys to lead the kind of life they have reason to value. What matters is not the mere possession of resources but what a person is able to do and be with them: their functionings, such as being adequately nourished, educated, healthy, and able to participate in community life. Income is only a means; the same income yields very different capabilities depending on a person's age, health, gender, disability, and social environment. Poverty, on this view, is capability failure — a shortfall in real freedom. Chronic poverty arises when deprivations become mutually reinforcing: poor health limits schooling, limited schooling limits employment, and the result is a durable contraction of the freedoms needed to escape. The approach is resolutely evaluative and individual-centred, though the individual is always situated in enabling or disabling social conditions.

The social capital approach. The social capital approach locates deprivation not in the individual's freedoms but in the relationships that surround them. Social capital — in Pierre Bourdieu's account, the resources accessible through durable networks of acquaintance and recognition, and in Robert Putnam's, the norms of reciprocity and trust embedded in social ties — enables people to secure information, support, and opportunity that their own means could not command. To be deprived of social capital is to be socially excluded: cut off from the bridging networks that carry people towards jobs, credit, and institutions. On this view chronic poverty persists because the poor are enclosed within bonding ties to others who are equally poor, while lacking the bridging and linking ties that reach outward and upward. The poverty trap is thus relational and, because networks are inherited, intergenerational.

Dimensions of comparison.

  1. Locus of deprivation. The capability approach locates poverty in the individual's freedom to achieve valued functionings; the social capital approach locates it in the structure of social relationships. The first looks inward to what a person can be and do; the second looks outward to whom a person is connected.

  2. View of the poor. Both reject the poor as passive; but the capability approach foregrounds agency and freedom of choice, whereas the social capital approach foregrounds embeddedness in networks. For Sen, expanding freedom is the goal; for social capital theorists, expanding and re-connecting networks is.

  3. Mechanism of persistence. Capability theory explains chronicity through the interlocking of deprivations that shrink the space of the possible. Social capital theory explains it through the closure of networks — bonding without bridging — that reproduces exclusion.

  4. Policy implication. The capability approach directs policy towards enlarging real freedoms — health, education, security — and is the intellectual basis of the Human Development Index. The social capital approach directs policy towards building bridging and linking ties, strengthening associational life, and countering social exclusion.

  5. Points of convergence. Both move decisively beyond the income measure of poverty; both are relational in effect, since capabilities are shaped by social arrangements and social capital confers real freedoms; and both explain why poverty endures rather than merely measuring its depth.

Assessment. The two approaches are best understood as complementary rather than competing. The capability approach supplies the richer normative account of what deprivation ultimately is — a loss of the freedom to live well — but can understate the relational mechanisms through which that freedom is denied. The social capital approach supplies precisely those mechanisms — the networks that open or close doors — but risks treating relationships as ends in themselves and can romanticise community while neglecting the wider structures of power that Marxists would stress. Read together, they explain chronic poverty as a self-reinforcing loss of both freedom and connection: the capability-poor lack the functionings to build valuable ties, and the network-poor lack the ties to expand their capabilities. A sociology of chronic poverty is strongest when it holds both insights at once.

Examiner's perspective

The pivotal skill this question tests is genuine comparison. Weak scripts describe Sen's capability approach and then, separately, social capital, never bringing them into contact. The marks lie in the connecting dimensions — locus of deprivation, view of the poor, mechanism of persistence, policy — along which the two are set side by side.

Examiners also reward candidates who keep the focus on chronic poverty and explain, for each approach, why poverty persists rather than merely how it is defined. Answers that drift into a general account of poverty lose the specificity the question demands.

The strongest scripts name the key thinkers accurately — Sen for capabilities, Bourdieu and Putnam for social capital — distinguish bonding from bridging ties, and conclude that the approaches are complementary, showing how their combination explains the poverty trap better than either in isolation. A thoughtful qualification, such as the neglect of structural power, demonstrates the critical distance that marks a first-class answer.