Blaming-a sign of psychosocial tensions in the community: findings from two surveys.

Abstract

Blame attributions were studied as indicators of tension between a person and his/her psychosocial resources. An eight-item blame scale was constructed to tap the areas of one's life about which a person made causal attributions to explain misfortune. This scale along with other measures was administered through household surveys to two samples of 537 and 185 community residents. Consistent with the predictions of the study, demographic groups with fewer social resources had higher blame scores, and residents reporting more stressful life events were more likely to blame. As expected, blame attributions were positively correlated with three measures of maladjustment and were unrelated to a separate measure of positive well-being. Discontent with social life, followed by financial situation, family life, and life opportunity blame, were consistently related to reports of maladjustment. Self-blame, however, was only marginally associated with poor adjustment. The same findings were obtained for two divergent samples of residents, suggesting that the relationships obtained here have considerable generalizability.