Authors

Discussion

After ten years, the research team returned to the same small Russian town to examine the changes in the public attitude towards the poor and the involvement of local society in the process of helping these people. The participatory methodology for providing social security in the Russian Federation (Read & Thelen, 2007; Kay, 2011), which was explored ten years ago (Sätre et al., 2016), will be re-examined and re-evaluated. This paper discusses the previous assumption and a current level of cooperation between people in difficult situations, local society, authorities and other stakeholders. However, the ten years brought new challenges such as digital inequality and a new type of digital divide (Ragnedda, 2017). The paper explores how digital inequality emerges in a small Russian town and affects poor people's lives. The discussion is based on repeated surveys carried out in 2011 and 2021. Both household surveys involved 500 families, with the sample chosen to represent the general structure of the Pavlovo population. This paper contributes to the academic discussion of the long-term trends in poverty (Nolan et al., 2017) and new challenges such as the digital divide in urban places (Palmer-Abbs, Cottrill & Farrington, 2021).