Enhancing advocacy for individuals in poverty: The role of a poverty simulation training.

Abstract

Psychologists have a responsibility to be advocates for the individuals they serve within public service settings, and there is a need to identify or develop training strategies to support these efforts. Low-income families are a subset of consumers who frequently require services within these settings yet also may face providers who are not optimally supportive. One factor that interferes with providers' ability to engage in empathic, well-informed, and effective advocacy is their underlying attributions about causes of poverty that overemphasize personal responsibility. The current studies examined whether a poverty simulation training would be sufficient to modify participants' poverty attributions. Undergraduate participants in Study 1 (N = 126, Mean age = 21.6, SD = 5.6) were significantly more likely to emphasize external causes of poverty following the simulation. In Study 2, social service providers (N = 98, Mean age = 38.58, SD = 11.56) reported lower internal beliefs following participation in a poverty simulation but did not shift to a predominantly external belief index. The results of these studies demonstrate that causal attributions of poverty within both student and professional samples can be modified by participation in a poverty simulation. Because these attributions have important implications for advocacy work with consumers and efforts to address poverty, the poverty simulation experience has the potential to be an effective training tool that could yield real-world impact. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).