engleski

Causes of poverty – poor people point of view

What causes poverty? Various theories answer that question in different way. This study will try to find out what poor people think about causes of their poverty. Researches on poverty attribution are very frequent globally, but most of them are based on investigating general population or are targeted to some specific groups (students, social workers). Just some covered poor population as targeted one. This study shows results of the research done in 2007 and 2008 in Zagreb. Target group were poor people and they had the opportunity to give their own insight about sources of their poverty. These results were compared to results given by employees of different economic status (low, middle and high). Attribution questionnaire surveying three factors of poverty – structural, individual and fatalistic - was used. It was found that all participants mostly inclined to structural sources of poverty: bad economy, transition, lack of social justice etc. In comparison to other participants, poor people were less open to attributing reasons for their poverty to individual factors (laziness, alcoholism, etc.) ; rather big number of them attributed reasons to fatalistic factors (fate, luck, etc.). In our discussion we will analyze mechanisms of poor people facing their poverty in the context of so called attributional bias.

poverty; attribution; attributional bias; coping

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