sen argues that deprivation should be seen as an absolute deprivation or dispossession such as starvation and visible hardship supplemented by a relative deprivation since deprivation also has to be judged in comparison with the experience of others in the society sen p according to sen the relative deprivation approach should not be used alone since this may lead to regarding poverty as an issue of inequality there is surprisingly little debate on what indicators are suitable this has to be attributed to the fact the empirical applications of multidimensional deprivation concepts are necessarily dataconstrained in most cases researchers only have a small number of options and common wisdom leads the analysts in their choice of the indicators used