                    This article articulates the value of ethnographic research into poverty and particularly into the issue of student hardship. The question is asked whether ‘poverty line’ models of research, which claim to establish objective and accurate measures of financial adversity, actually help in understanding the problem of student hardship. Similar questions are asked about discourses that use the language of participation and social exclusion. Consideration is given to the value of listening to young people talk about their experiences of studying and living without sufficient means. I refer here not only to the ethics of including ‘the subjects’ of research in the knowledge-making activity, but also to the value of the ethnographic material that is produced. This offers insights into the particular social problem which it is critical to understand in order to respond effectively. It is also material that is not available through more traditional forms of research. While the focus in this article is on university students and financial hardship, it is also arguing more generally in favour of giving priority to interpretivist tradition in research about contemporary social problems. The capacity of tertiary students to meet their basic needs has become a recurrent social issue, especially since the implementation of economic liberal ‘reforms’ that began in the mid-1980s, including the re-introduction of tuition fees and a user-pays approach to most campus services. Since then we have witnessed a series of interventions that include steady augmentation of private contributions towards the costs of attaining a degree by a lifting of ‘restrictions’ on what students were required to pay. In this article, attention is given to the benefits and problems associated with longstanding approaches to poverty research. Student poverty is used as a case study to consider the heuristic value of poverty line research for understanding what it means to not have enough money to cover basic needs. Questions are asked regarding whether the empirical, positivist-informed ‘poverty line’ models of research, which claim to establish objective and accurate measures of financial adversity, actually help in understanding the problem of student hardship. Similar questions are asked about discourses that use the language of participation and social exclusion. Consideration is given to the value of listening to young people talk about their experiences of poverty, referring not only to the ethical value of including ‘the subjects’ of research in the knowledge-making activity, but also to the information that participants produce that gives us insights into the problem which are critical for understanding and responding to the problem and which are not available through more traditional forms of research. This is also part of a more general argument for giving greater priority to the interpretivist tradition in research on contemporary social problems. It is argued that poverty line research and social exclusion explanations are limited in the contribution they can make towards building an accurate understanding of social phenomena like student poverty. Those approaches are limited because they are not designed to produce information that allows us to see how various aspects of the student’s social world inform and interact with each other. I refer here to a holistic understanding of a social phenomenon – something that can be gained through ethnographic research. I refer to my own research that was carried out in the early 2000s, and to the work of others who have begun using this approach to illustrate the kinds of insights that Dr Judith Bessant Professor in Youth Studies & Sociology RMIT University Melbourne, Victoria Email: Judith.bessant@rmit.edu.au