Exploring the associations between youths' explanations of poverty at the societal level and judgements of distributive justice.

Abstract

This study explores whether adolescents' societal explanations regarding the causes of poverty are associated with distributive justice reasoning. Survey data were collected from 425 6th-12th graders who answered questions concerning the causes of poverty and a vignette depicting a hypothetical class project designed to assess the degree to which the adolescent respondent would distribute resources based on principles of need or merit. Findings indicated that adolescents who explained poverty based on structural or a mix of structural and individual causes were more likely to base decisions about resource distribution on need, whereas those who attributed poverty to individual causes distributed resources based on merit. Participants who were older, female, Caucasian, and from a higher socioeconomic status (SES) background were more likely to indicate need as a basis for distributing resources. Poverty attributions (i.e., societal, and mixed) had a significant interaction with age and SES in predicting distributive justice reasoning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).