2) that those you see were even eligible for the grant (it is only for those receiving income related benefits).
Note while not the nicest area of London suburbs the Job Seekers Allowance claimant rate is only 3% [1] with another 5.5% on Incapacity Benefit or Employment and Support Allowance. The vast majority of JSA claimants have been claiming less than 6 months rather than long term. [2]
There are particularly deprived pockets though but I question your ability to identify by pure observation outside a supermarket real income sources.
Not everything needs citation in the form of a survey or scientific paper. I doubt the results of it would be honest as the people who they would be surveying have an interest in lying about the things they have purchased with it.
Some things are blatantly obvious if you peel your eyes occasionally and observe humanity.
No, but in the UK there is a wind of judgemental tabloid nastiness in this area. Lies like this are made up daily, based on a very small minority, and huge chunks of people are tarred with the same brush.
So, yeah, where is the research?
Well, there is none, because apart from tabloid smearing lies, there is none.
What is "obvious" is how nasty people are in the UK towards the poor working classes, who are under constant attack.
What I see when I stand outside ASDA are a bunch of normal people, and then some poor people who struggle to buy food and pay their rent. I don't see fancy clothes and designer pushchairs, I see old tracksuits and second-hand pushchairs, I see people who don't have jobs and feel bad about themselves.
Demand for food-banks in the UK has soared. But if only they didn't spend it on fags and wide-screen TVs they'd be able to eat.
> The problem is not specific to one traditional "class".
Except it is, because it is only a problem by the implication that signs of wealth means that insufficient money must have been used on what is needed for the infant
I know the differences, probably more than you realise.
I presented a hypothesis, which you can turn into a theory by sitting outside ASDA for a bit with a clipboard and a copy of SPSS. My suggestion was that you should try it.
Your original statement was "the maternity grant (until yanked by the government) was used to buy designer gear for the mother, ..."
That it's happened at least once, I have no doubt. But I think you mean to use the phrase "was used to buy" to mean that it happens often enough to base a policy decision upon.
The useful questions are "how often does it happen?" and more importantly "did yanking the policy lead to overall improved infant mortality rates?"
Those cannot be answered by "sitting outside ASDA [in Feltham or Hounslow] for a bit." As an extreme example, even if 100% of the people in those two places immediately pop into an off-license, use the money to buy liquor, walk outside, and pour it down the drain, you would need to see if that pattern is the same across the country.
In this extreme example, it might be that 0% of the rest of the country misuses their funds. There are 254,00 people in the London Borough of Hounslow. There are 62 million people in the United Kingdom. If no one else misused those funds, then an overall misuse rate of 0.4% across the entire country is rather good, and the appropriate policy decision would be to understand what is special about Hounslow and how that one region might be improved.
Thus, doing as you suggest would not provide sufficient information to establish an answer for my first question, much less my second.
While you write "Some things are blatantly obvious if you peel your eyes occasionally and observe humanity.", it's very hard to "peel your eyes" and see things when you aren't there.
Then you should know that your hypothesis remains unsupported by any data until that is done, and that it's not the job of people who doubt your hypothesis to do so.
Apart from that, the location itself would introduce a bias, and I'm curious how exactly you would recognize women in the process of spending the maternity grant.