Explanations Of Poverty Research Articles

Child poverty in the UK: Measures, prevalence and intra-household sharing

There is cross-party agreement on the urgency of addressing child poverty in the UK, but less consensus on how to define and measure it, and understand its causes and effects. The Conservative/Liberal Coalition government’s policy and rhetoric favoured individual explanations for poverty, portraying poor parents as making bad spending decisions, and transmitting their attitudes and behaviours on to their children. This article draws on the 2012 UK Poverty and Social Exclusion survey (PSE2012) to examine how far the realities of life for poor children match these explanations. Analysis covers four strands: the prevalence of child poverty; the demographics of poor children; the experiences of poor children; and how parents in poverty allocate household resources. Little evidence is found to support this ‘culture of poverty’ theory, and parents who are themselves in poverty are found to engage in a range of behaviours suggesting they sacrifice personal necessities to provide for children.

Navigating the stigmatised identities of poverty in austere times: Resisting and responding to narratives of personal failure

Behavioural explanations of poverty and disadvantage have figured heavily in political rhetoric in the era of austerity, as a means to understand trajectories into poverty and subsequent relationships between benefit claimants and the state. These discourses are not restricted to political debate, as previous studies demonstrate they impact upon public consciousness and structure the ways that the general public think about poverty, as well as shaping the ways in which people living on low incomes are treated. Drawing upon the testimonies of 62 people in England and Scotland experiencing poverty, this article seeks to understand our participants’ responses to these discourses, in particular: how these behavioural explanations impact upon their understanding of their own situations, as well as their self perceptions; how these discourses shape their relationships with others, in terms of their experience of disrespect; and how participants seek to dissociate themselves from their stigmatising implications.

Hunger Hurts

Austerity food blogs have become prominent as household food budgets have become tighter, government finances constrained, and an ideology of austerity has become dominant. The British version of austerity privileges reducing government spending by cutting welfare benefits, and legitimizes this through individual failure explanations of poverty and stereotypes of benefit claimants. Austerity food blogs, written by those forced to live hand to mouth, are a hybrid form of digital culture that merges narratives of lived experience, food practices and political commentary in ways that challenge the dominant views on poverty. The popular blog A Girl Called Jack disrupts the austerity hegemony by breaking the silence that the stigma of poverty imposes on the impoverished and by personalizing poverty through Jack Monroe's narratives of her lived experience of it, inviting the reader's pity and refuting reductionist explanations of the causes of poverty. Monroe also challenges austerity through practices derived through her personal knowledge gained during her struggle to survive and eat healthily on £10-a-week food budget. This combination of narrative and survival practices written evocatively and eloquently resonate powerfully with readers; however the response to Monroe's blog highlights a deep uneasiness in British society over growing levels of poverty, and deep divisions over who is responsible for addressing it; and more fundamentally, over identifying and defining the modern poor and modern poverty.

Importancia económica y social de la regulación de la fecundidad

Deseo empezar esta breve exposición sobre tema tan importante y controvertido, con dos afirmaciones que yo suscribo plenamente: 1a. Las explicaciones demográficas de la pobreza siempre han sido muy útiles para los grupos explotadores. 2a. Paternidad responsable significa libertad y conciencia para engendrar hijos y educarlos; ella exige amor y madurez en la familia, y un orden justo y humano en la sociedad.

What explains frontline workers' views on poverty? A comparison of three types of welfare sector institutions

The study analysed views on poverty among Finnish frontline workers in three welfare sector institutions. Two different institutional logics, universal and selective, and two sectors, the public and the voluntary, were represented. A nationwide survey among social security officials, municipal social workers and diaconal workers was utilised (N = 2,124). The methods applied included factor analysis, the examination of means and multivariate analysis of variance. Frontline workers were found to support structural reasons for poverty regardless of institutional affiliation. Analyses, however, also revealed significant differences between the institutions, but not of the kind expected. Social security officials, working in a universal institution, were less likely to endorse structural factors and more likely to endorse individualistic poverty explanations than were social and diaconal workers. Type of education and personal political ideology, respectively, were also found to be of significant importance for poverty perceptions, independent of institutional logic.

The Game of Social Life

This article presents the development of a new simulation activity, the Game of Social Life. The activity introduces students to concepts of social stratification based on multiple dimensions of poverty, including inequalities related to housing, education, occupational status, social power, and health outcomes. The game was administered to students enrolled in a social psychology course at a small, private, liberal arts university located in the midwestern United States. Qualitative analysis of 25 students’ written reactions revealed that the game was engaging and successful in motivating students to adopt a new perspective, acknowledge inequality and explanations for poverty, self-reflect about privilege and oppression, and consider solutions to these problems. The activity was also assessed as a training exercise with 16 staff members at a nonprofit agency located in an urban area in southeastern Canada. These assessments indicate that the activity can be used in a variety of contexts.

What do Europeans Believe to be the Causes of Poverty? A Multilevel Analysis of Heterogeneity Within and Between Countries

People’s explanations for why some individuals are poor are of great importance to a comprehensive study of poverty. This cross-cultural study aims to profile differences and similarities in perceptions of the causes of poverty within and between 28 European Union countries. Multilevel models were estimated to allow two levels of analysis to be studied simultaneously, namely the individual and the country, and a multilevel latent class model was selected with six classes of countries and seven classes of individuals. Despite the generalization of the social explanations of poverty at the individual level, some groups also blame the poor for their situation. Individuals in greater economic difficulty attributed more social causes to poverty than those who were better off financially and socially. At the country level, the most developed countries believe poverty has individualistic and fatalistic causes, whereas the least developed countries explain poverty based on the injustices of society. We found that this methodology permits a deeper and richer analysis than traditional clustering methods as it accounts for different nested levels of analysis simultaneously.

Who Blames the Poor?

ABSTRACTThe article analyses the support for and determinants of individualistic explanations of poverty among Europeans. The analyses are conducted using multilevel logistic regression models. Findings suggest that the level of support for the individualistic explanation of poverty varies between European nations. Hence, the results contradict the analysis of Alesina and Glaeser (2004, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe. A World of Difference), which gives us a very homogenous picture of European attitudes towards the poor. Among the determinants of poverty perceptions, welfare regime, short-term economic growth and social expenditures as well as individual-level demographic factors, perceived economic hardship, political affiliation and egalitarian values are associated with the individualistic attribution for poverty. In general, the findings hold critical implications for future research to develop further dynamic measurement of contextual level explanatory factors.

Perceptions of poverty attributions in Europe: a multilevel mixture model approach

The perception of the causes of poverty has long been recognized as a very important factor in the broader study of this social phenomenon. This study covers 15 European Union countries and considers three types of poverty attributions: individualistic, societal, and fatalistic. The individualistic view perception believes the poor are responsible for their situation, the societal perspective blames society for poverty and the fatalistic view considers poverty to be the result of bad luck or fate. A multilevel mixture model with three clusters of countries and six clusters of individuals was identified. Despite the generalization of the social explanations of poverty at the individual or micro level, there are also groups that emphasize more individualistic explanations, blaming the poor for their condition. At the country or macro level, the most developed cluster believes in the individualistic and fatalistic causes of poverty, whereas the least developed clusters explain poverty based on the injustices of society. There is diversity in the way these countries perceive poverty.

“Beyond My Imagination”: Learning the Sociology of Poverty Through Service After the Tuscaloosa Tornado

In recent years, educators from diverse academic disciplines have created service learning courses in response to natural disasters. However, sociology courses have been slow to integrate service learning after disasters. In this paper, the learning experiences of fourteen students enrolled in a service learning course during the Fall 2011 semester at the University of Alabama are analyzed, four months after the April 27, 2011 tornado event. In this course, entitled Gender and Poverty, students were required to volunteer 30 hours over a 10-week period with an organization that assisted tornado survivors in addition to attending weekly class meetings and completing class assignments. Despite initial difficulties finding interactive service experiences for the students, post-tests and journal assignments indicated a shift in students’ explanations of poverty from mostly individual-level explanations to structural explanations of poverty. The service experience also emotionally transformed the students, who through their service efforts, developed empathy for storm survivors.

Poverty, the Underclass, and Immigration: Another Look at the Debate on Poverty

Author(s): Mueller, Elizabeth | Abstract: The current popular debate on poverty focuses on the underclass. Poverty is considered, in this context, a problem of unskilled, uneducated individuals or of groups ofpeople whose lifestyles mire them in poverty. In this article, the author argues that the focus on the underclass, and subsequent use of individually and culturally focused explanations for poverty, skew our understanding of the problem and divert our attention from appropriate policy responses. Using evidence from four different periods of immigration into Ameri­ can cities, an argument is presentecffor the importance ofstructural and institutional factors in understanding the success or failure of each group to find work and move up. The author concludes that these factors are better able to account for poverty and justify increased attention to structural conditions in poverty.

Comparison of the Social and Professional Ideology of Caseworkers and Community Social Workers in Israel

This article seeks to study whether caseworkers and community social workers subscribe to similar social work values, such as promoting social change and social justice, by comparing the social and professional ideologies of 123 caseworkers and 113 community social workers in Israel. The findings reveal that the community social workers consistently showed a greater social orientation than the caseworkers. They were more inclined than the caseworkers to believe that the government is responsible for social provision and to support universal benefits. They were less inclined to believe that the welfare state has negative effects on its recipients and placed more emphasis on the social-structural causes of poverty. They attributed greater importance than the caseworkers to the goal of promoting social justice and were more inclined to believe that social workers should engage in community development and policy practice. However, alongside the differences, members of both groups attributed importance to social justice and government responsibility for welfare, and favoured social-structural explanations of poverty.

Modernisation and Time Preferences in Tanzania: Evidence from a Large-Scale Elicitation Exercise

Assumptions about individual time preferences are important for explanations of poverty and development. Data from a large-scale elicitation exercise in Tanzania show significantly higher levels of impatience in urban areas than in rural areas. This result remains robust to adding controls for socio-economic differences between rural and urban areas, which possibly correlate with time preferences. We attribute this to differences in ‘modernisation’ between urban and rural areas, with modernisation leading to increased impatience. This is corroborated by the observed positive correlation between impatience and education; the latter being an important vehicle of modernisation for traditional societies in Tanzania.

The Poverty in Psychoanalysis: ‘Poverty’ of Psychoanalysis?

The article reviews psychoanalytic scholarship on the themes of poverty and deprivation available on the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publications (PEP-web). The article evaluates select definitions and explanations of poverty as illustrated in the scientific papers published in the PEP-web from 1933 to 2003 (covering 70 years) and finds that psychoanalytic scholarship has very little to say about poverty or the poor. In spite of references to the poverty of dreams, poverty of affect, poverty of intellect, there is in reality little engagement with ‘real’ poverty. The reasons and effects of this neglect are firstly traced to the attitudinal biases and beliefs held by the psychoanalytic authors which prevents them from acknowledging poor and deprived as worthy of their attention. The review also points out to great confusions, oversimplifications and neglect shown in the use of poverty and related terminologies. Absence of fuller appreciation of poverty is then traced to some philosophical quandaries in psychoanalytic epistemology such as the place of real versus psychic, culture versus individual and need versus value to cite a few. A third reason for this neglect may be attributed to the uneven spread, reception and development of psychoanalysis in different geopolit-zical locations, and the neglect in addressing these cultural differences could be behind these social inequalities remaining unaddressed in the literature.

Attributions for poverty in Finland: a non-generic approach

This article analyses three specific categories of the poor – immigrants, families with children and the retired – and compares the perceptions gained from this analysis to generic attributions of the causes of poverty. It examines whether different explanations can be attributed to certain socio-economic characteristics and political ideologies. The data derive from a survey conducted in Finland in 2008. The results indicate that the public shares distinctive causal beliefs when it comes to the different categories of the poor. When moving from the retired to families with children and to immigrants, support for explanations that blame the individual increases and support for explanations that blame structural conditions decreases. In addition, when the poor are divided into specific categories the dominant three-tier typology of poverty explanations does not seem to hold. Instead, the public is more likely to distinguish between internal and external reasons for non-generic poverty. The results suggest that the hypotheses of in-group favouritism and self-interest are supported. In addition, political ideology is strongly associated with attributions for poverty.

Concentrated Disadvantage and Beliefs about the Causes of Poverty: A Multi-Level Analysis

Studies of beliefs about social stratification have generally focused on how individual-level factors shape people's explanations of poverty and inequality. In this article, the authors contribute to this literature by adding a community-level measure of “concentrated disadvantage” (poverty and associated conditions) to models predicting support for individualistic (person-centered) and structuralist (system-challenging) beliefs about the causes of poverty. Using data from two Los Angeles County surveys and the 1990 Census, multi-level linear and logistic regression models reveal that higher levels of concentrated disadvantage are associated with increased support for both individualist and structuralist explanations of poverty—a “dual consciousness” pattern the authors attribute to increased exposure to social conditions that simultaneously foster sympathetic and antagonistic attitudes toward the poor. These findings add useful information to our knowledge of stratification beliefs and contribute to a growing body of studies showing that “place-level” factors can be important determinants of beliefs and attitudes net of individual-level covariates.

When the Wealthy Are Poor: Poverty Explanations and Local Perspectives in Southwestern Madagascar

ABSTRACT To reduce poverty, one must understand what poverty means in local contexts. We used focus groups to elicit a “folk model” of poverty from Masikoro, Vezo, and Mikea people in rural southwestern Madagascar and then placed this model in dialogue with four social science models: economic growth, substantivism, mode of production, and livelihoods. The folk model emphasizes household continuity, production of people, and exploitative expropriation by the wealthy. Absent from the folk model is scarcity of natural and social resources, the core of economic growth and livelihoods explanations. Consistent with substantivism, poverty and wealth are states one may occupy simultaneously, not maximizable quantities. Compatible with mode of production, the root cause of poverty is the rules regarding control over property. Poverty interventions based on profit, competition, intensification, or devolution of control to traditional social institutions would likely be culturally foreign to rural Malagasy and could further the gap between rich and poor.

Public beliefs regarding the causes of poverty during transition

PurposeLow‐income transitional countries in the region of the Caucasus and Central Asia lack the existence of a solid assessment of public perceptions regarding the causes of poverty during transition. The purpose of this paper is to fill that gap in the existing literature.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses the secondary analysis of a recent cross‐sectional multinational survey to shed light on public beliefs of the causes of poverty in seven countries of the region – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. In addition, Russia and Ukraine are used as a comparison point. The theoretical framework for this study is that the subjective beliefs regarding the explanations of poverty can be classified into three broad groups: individualistic, fatalistic, and structural. Hence, regression coefficients and marginal effects of the multinomial logit regression model (MNLM) are estimated to associate the set of various individual, households, and community characteristics selected in the conceptual framework with the likelihood of choosing one of the three afore‐mentioned explanations of poverty.FindingsThe results of cross‐tabulation reveal that in a majority of the countries studied, the predominant explanation for poverty is structural, with the exception of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where predominant explanations are, respectively, fatalistic and individualistic. The results of MNLM show that most individual, household, and community characteristics possess the expected direction and are in line with previous findings. However, some of the characteristics have a similar significant effect across several countries, while other characteristics are significant for a single country only.Social implicationsThese findings demonstrate that despite the dominant post‐socialist ideology which favors individualistic and fatalistic explanations of poverty based on the economic rationality of market capitalism, the efforts of the elites in promoting and imposing these ideologies has not been fully successful. Nevertheless, no single unified model of the determinants of beliefs regarding the causes of poverty in the countries of the region is observed.Originality/valueThis is one of the very few papers aimed at assessing public perceptions regarding the causes of poverty in transitional countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Poverty and Aspirations Failure

This paper models the role of internal constraints in causing aspirations failure at the individual level. It shows how initial disadvantage increases the likelihood of binding internal constraints and hence aspirations failure, thus suggesting a new behavioral explanation for poverty traps. In examining common approaches to relaxing such internal constraints, it describe how an individual’s endogenous choice of a cognitive window (i.e. a set of relevant similar individuals)can limit the e¤ectiveness of role models. Further, we consider how the distribution of initial status determines the degree of connectedness in a society and hence the individual perception of these constraints. Our work provides a normative justification for programs that aim to empower participants through a direct positive shock to their aspirations.

Life Course Risks or Cumulative Disadvantage? The Structuring Effect of Social Stratification Determinants and Life Course Events on Poverty Transitions in Europe

The aim of this article is to assess the importance of a life event perspective on poverty in relation to the traditional social stratification approach. Lately, poverty has often been seen as a life course risk associated with certain life events and less influenced by characteristics of social position. The empirical part of this article explores the importance of the life course perspective as well as the social stratification framework for the understanding of the poverty risk. The question asked is whether risky life events have the same poverty-triggering effect for all social stratification groups or whether processes of cumulative disadvantage prevail at crucial life transitions. The findings, based on random effects event history analyses of the European Community Household Panel Survey, show that structural and biographical explanations of poverty do not present themselves as opposites, but they rather complement each other and their interactions provide interesting insights. The results show that the most vulnerable social groups are more affected by the poverty-triggering effect of a life stage like childbirth. On the other hand, job loss is a more general poverty trigger, substantially increasing everyone's poverty entry risk. Also partnership dissolution has a poverty triggering effect for people of all educational levels and all social classes. In line with previous research, we found that partnership dissolution affects the poverty entry risk of women more strongly.