|
Article Excerpt
A major portion of social work practice worldwide consists of the provision of services to people with needs and problems associated with living in poverty (Elliott, 1997; Healy, 2001; Hokenstad, Khinduka, & Midgley, 1992; Jones, 2002). These problems include insufficient financial resources to meet basic needs, underaccess to social goods; marginalization, oppression, and social exclusion; and feelings of shame, humiliation, and powerlessness (Beresford, Green, Lister, & Woodward, 1999; Lister, 2004). Among the factors that influence this practice are the perceptions of poverty and its causes that are held by a wide range of actors, including the general public and media, politicians, social and economic policymakers, social services management and supervisors, and social workers and service users themselves (Alcock, 1997; Bullock, 1995).
The coming together of the various perceptions of the multiple actors creates a complex social discourse on poverty (Lister, 2004). This discourse not only shapes public perceptions of those living in poverty and the policies adopted toward them but also determines the contours of the professional encounter between social workers and service users who are living in poverty. It influences how social workers and their clients understand and define problems and the relevant strategies and intervention approaches for dealing with them (Bullock, 1995; Parsloe, 1990). Given the centrality of poverty and of the interaction between social work practitioners and service users to social work and its practice, this article explores social workers' and service users' attributions of the causes of poverty, with the aim of determining whether the participants in this interaction have similar views.
ATTRIBUTIONS OF THE CAUSES OF POVERTY
The etiology of poverty has been the subject of a long, ongoing debate in both public and academic spheres (Alcock, 1997; Danziger & Haveman, 2001; Lister, 2004; Miller, 1996). Three main types of causal attributions of poverty can be discerned in the theoretical and empirical literature: individualistic, structural, and fatalistic (Alcock, 1997; Bullock, Williams, & Limbert, 2003; Miller, 1996; Zucker & Weiner, 1993). The individualistic attribution argues that poverty stems mainly from the personality and behaviors of the poor. Based on a pathological model of social causation, it has moral and psychological variants. The moral variant emphasizes such individual deficits as lack of motivation, effort, and initiative; passivity, dependency, and lack of self-reliance; lack of job readiness; poor work habits; and (erroneous) perceptions of external constraints to finding and holding a job (Mead, 1992, 1994; Murray, 1984). The psychological variant emphasizes the intrapersonal origins of poverty: emotional problems (for example, depression) or lack of interpersonal abilities (Alcock, 1997).
The structural attribution regards poverty as stemming from the complex operations of local, national, and global forces, which include the actions of classes, groups, agencies, and institutions that interact within a particular social and economic order (Cornia, 2004; Ferge & Miller, 1987; Lang, 2007; Nissanke & Thorbecke, 2007; Wilson, 1987, 2006). Based on a structural model of social causation, it emphasizes forces such as globalization and international economic forces; the capitalist market economy and specific economic policies; limited employment opportunities stemming from local geographic, physical, or economic conditions; low wages and limited demand for or oversupply of low-skilled labor; insufficient social welfare provision and social protection; and lack of political power and systematic discrimination and deprivation on the basis of class, race, ethnicity, or gender.
The fatalistic attribution explains poverty through factors over which neither the individual nor the society has much control. These factors include fate and bad luck, inborn lack of ability or talent, and disability and illness, among many other unfortunate circumstances (Cozzarelli, Wilkinson, & Tagler, 2001; Zucker & Weiner, 1993). This explanation is reported mainly in public opinion surveys on poverty (for example, Feagin, 1975; Feather, 1974; Furnham, 1982).
Because of the social and policy implications of public attributions of poverty, these explanations have served as the theoretical point of departure for a large number of studies in different countries in the past four decades (Cozzarelli et al., 2001; Hunt, 1996; Kluegel & Smith, 1986; Park, Phillips, & Robinson, 2007; Smith & Stone, 1989). Although these studies have presented the explanations separately, they have also found associations among them. In particular, positive associations have been found between fatalistic attributions and the tendency to attribute poverty to structural causes, and negative associations have been found between individualistic and structural attributions (Bullock, 2004; Zucker & Weiner, 1993).
Given the centrality of poverty within social work and the assumption that social workers' perceptions of poverty are particularly germane to their dealing with this social problem and its consequences, much effort has been directed toward the study of the causal attributions of poverty held by social workers (Bullock, 2004; Hendrickson & Axelson, 1985; Reeser & Epstein, 1987; Rehner, Ishee, Salloum, & Velasques, 1997; Weiss & Gal, 2007) and by social work students (Rosenthal, 1993; Schwartz & Robinson, 1991; Sun, 2001; Weiss, 2005; Weiss, Gal, Cnaan, & Maglejlic, 2002) in different countries. All of these studies examined attributions to both structural and individualistic causes. Most also examined attributions to fatalistic causes, such as bad luck, chance, or poor health (for example, Sun, 2001). Some distinguished between individualistic explanations, such as moral deficits (for...
|
