How do people understand the causes of poverty and wealth? A revised structural dimensionality of the attributions about poverty and wealth scales
Fecha
2022-11
Tipo
artículo original
Autores
Sainz Martínez, Mario
García Castro, Juan Diego
Jiménez Moya, Gloria
Lobato Ortiz, Ricardo
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Resumen
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.
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Palabras clave
POVERTY, WEALTH, scales, attributions, STRUCTURAL DESIGN