Researchers have studied the poor as individuals, as families and households, as members of poor communities, neighborhoods and regions, as products of larger poverty creating structures. They have been analyzed as victims of crime and criminals, as members of minority cultures, as passive consumers of mass culture and active producers of a "counterculture", as participants in the informal economy, as inventors of survival strategies, as an economic burden and as a reserve army of labor—to mention just some of the preoccupations of poverty research.
The elites, who occupy the small upper stratum within the category of the non-poor, and their functions in the emergence and reproduction of poverty are as interesting and important an object for poverty research as are the poor themselves. The elites have images of the poor and of poverty which shape their decisions and actions. So far, little is known about those images, except as they are sketchily portrayed in popular stereotypes. The elites may well ignore or deny the external effects of their own actions upon the living conditions of the poor. Many social scientists may take a very different view. As poverty emerged and was reproduced, legal frameworks were created to contain the problems it caused with profound, and largely unknown, consequences for the poor themselves. In general, political, educational and social institutions tend to ignore or even damage the interests of the poor. In constructing a physical infrastructure for transport, industry, trade and tourism, the settlements of the poor are often the first to suffer or to be left standing and exposed to pollution, noise and crowding.