How do people understand the causes of poverty and wealth? A revised structural dimensionality of the attributions about poverty and wealth scales

Bibliographic Data

ID12937460
AuthorsMario Sainz (0000-0002-2048-5872, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, corresponding author), Juan Diego García-Castro (0000-0002-9662-6547, Universidad de Costa Rica), Gloria Jiménez‐moya (0000-0002-5927-6437, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), R M Lobato (0000-0003-4152-7020, Les Roches Marbella International School of Hotel Management)
Year2022
Volume31
Issue1
Pages81-100
Publication date2022-11-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Poverty and Social Justice (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1759-8273 • E-ISSN: 1759-8281
PublisherPolicy Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1332/175982721x16645485533332
OpenAlexW4308136708
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited25

The attributional process, defined as the process of inferring the causes of the events that surround individuals in their daily lives, can potentially shape the understanding of poverty and wealth. For instance, it might influence how people behave, what they expect from poor and wealthy groups in their society, and how they judge them. However, the existing measures that capture these attributional phenomena have several limitations. Some attributional factors lack empirical support, or some implemented items lack relevance in contemporary society. Therefore, the present study is aimed to deepen the understanding of the attributional process by reviewing the factor structure of the poverty (Cozzarelli et al, 2001) and wealth attribution scales (Bullock et al, 2003), as well as adapting and verifying the validity of these scales among the Mexican population. To do so, we revised the factor structure of the poverty and wealth attribution scales to create a unified scale. We back-translated the original items, conducted exploratory and confirmatory analyses, restructured the scale’s factors, and related them with other covariates. Our results indicate that these scales uniquely differentiate between internal and external attributions, demonstrating that the new factor structure is better for measuring attributional processes regarding the perceived causes of poverty and wealth than those used in previous research

Attribution · Confirmatory factor analysis · Economic growth · Economics · Geography · Population · Poverty · Scale (ratio · Sociology · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics · Demography · Psychological Well-being and Life Satisfaction · Psychology · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment · Social Psychology

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