Hi Allison!

How are you operationalizing "material hardship"?  That could help narrow down questionnaires that could be a good fit. 

Just a suggestion, but you could look at financial strain or financial threat.  There are 2 surveys I know of:

1. Aldana, S. G., & Liljenquist, W. (1998). Validity and reliability of a financial strain survey. Journal of Financial Counseling and Planning, 9(2), 11-19.

2.  Marjanovic, Z., Greenglass, E. R., Fiksenbaum, L., & Bell, C. M. (2013). Psychometric evaluation of the Financial Threat Scale (FTS) in the context of the great recession. Journal of Economic Psychology, 36, 1-10.

Hope this helps,

Sally

Dear Allison,

By material hardship, probably you meant economic dimension of poverty (not the social side). In that case, you can look to the works of Professor Dr. Amartya Sen (capability approach more precisely), Rowntree (1901) who offered physiological approach of poverty calculation, and UNDP approach (1997) of poverty measurement. I can instantly tell you few materialistic indicators, such as access to safe water, sanitary latrine, and electricity; food intake per day by men/women/kids; shortage time food intake per day by men/women/kids; land holding size, land holding status, other asset holding, ownership of house, type of house, income, total employment per year, calamity time income/employment, monthly expenditure, savings, length of use of loan, size of loan, etc. Hope I could help to some extent. Happy research.

You can try this book for a detail literature on poverty indicators.

Relative Effectiveness of Alternative Microfinance-driven Poverty Alleviation Programs in Bangladesh”. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK. ISBN: 978-1-4438-5275-3 (available in Amazon).

(Feeling a bit shy in recommending my own text)    

Thanks to you both - you have given me multiple ways to think about "material hardship," which is what I was needing.