the household composition also plays a major role in determining whether a family is poor or not and how family composition and family living arrangements are taken into account in the estimation of poverty rates can make a significant difference in poverty appraisal box for the sake of simplicity the standard approach collects information on income at household level and it is then attributed to each member using an equivalence scale assuming that all individual and collective resources of household members are pooled together the equivalence scale is assumed to reflect the relative needs of the household members including children and the economies of scale generated by members sharing resources