Poverty Awareness: Development and Validation of a New Scale for Examining Attitudes regarding the Aetiology and Relational–Symbolic Aspects of Poverty

Abstract

This study describes the development and validation of a new Poverty Awareness Scale (PAS). Existing scales of attitudes towards poverty focus on poverty’s aetiology, leaving other notions regarding poverty underexplored. Our new scale is based on the key role that relational–symbolic aspects of poverty play in current critical poverty knowledge and adds the examination of these aspects. The scale was distributed to 127 social workers and social work students before and after six different poverty-aware courses in Israel. For psychometric validation, we calculated the internal consistency of the construction of the scale dimensions and of the relationships between them. The scale evinced high levels of internal consistency. Construct validity was established through correlational analyses between our scale and a xenophobia scale. In addition, we found a significant difference in attitudes between the pre- and post-poverty-aware courses, with participants altering their attitudes in the direction of explanations that were more structural and exhibiting increased awareness of the relational symbolic aspects of poverty. The new PAS has the potential to be useful for service training and social work education.

Poverty, social work, and radical incrementalism: Current developments of the poverty‐aware paradigm

“…Studies have provided evidence that following the training, participants tended to understand poverty through structural rather than individualistic explanations and became more aware of the connections between poverty and Otherness (Weiss‐Dagan and Krumer‐Nevo, 2022). Other studies found that after receiving PAP training, social workers engaged in the practice of actualization of rights (Weiss‐Gal, 2022).…”

“…A study that examined social workers' attitudes toward poverty found that the courses transformed conservative attitudes into more structural and critical ones (Weiss‐Dagan and Krumer‐Nevo, 2022). In another study, social workers attested that their worldviews regarding their role as social workers changed, and reported that they had gained knowledge and tools that enabled them to reach out and establish close and beneficial relationships with service users who had previously been beyond their reach (Ben‐Rabi, 2019).…”

Poverty-Aware Programs in Social Service Departments in Israel: A Rapid Evidence Review of Outcomes for Service Users and Social Work Practice

“…All the studies that examined social workers' attitudes found that they developed a degree of critical analysis during the PAP training and ongoing supervision, e.g., [31,33]. A quantitative study that investigated the attitudes of 127 social workers before and after PAP training courses found significantly higher scores in the perception of poverty as structural and in acknowledging the relational and symbolic aspects of living in poverty at T2 [31].…”

“…All the studies that examined social workers' attitudes found that they developed a degree of critical analysis during the PAP training and ongoing supervision, e.g., [31,33]. A quantitative study that investigated the attitudes of 127 social workers before and after PAP training courses found significantly higher scores in the perception of poverty as structural and in acknowledging the relational and symbolic aspects of living in poverty at T2 [31]. In P2, 33 social workers were interviewed before, during, and after the three-year pilot phase of the program, showing that they developed structural and holistic interpretations of service users' stories that connected closely to the relational and symbolic meanings of poverty: "[Previously] I thought that the children should leave the house .…”