Causal Attributions for Poverty among Low Income Communities of Badia, Nigeria

Abstract

A preponderance of poverty attribution studies have been on middle class adults from developed countries. Where cross cultural studies were extended to developing countries, samples have been of university students or those not experiencing poverty directly. Possibilities of extending generalizations across cultures have therefore been difficult. A modified causes of poverty index was administered on a sample (n=383) from Badia, a low income community in Lagos, Nigeria. The results of the study showed that poverty attribution was understandable in terms of respondents' Social and Economic Status (SES). However, while the results confirmed earlier findings that disadvantaged persons preponderantly adopted external, structural attributions for poverty, it was however shown, unlike in previous findings, that the disadvantaged are likely to combine fatalistic and structural attributions in compromise explanations. These results therefore indicate that the neglect of fatalistic explanat ions in many previous studies may be unfounded.