The development of the Systems and Individual Responsibility for Poverty (SIRP) Scale

Abstract

Poverty is a widespread social problem that affects a substantial number of Americans each year. Attitudes can affect a range of judgments, behavioral intentions, and actions related to addressing this problem. However, existing tools that measure attitudes toward those in poverty do not fully capture the deficit ideology that is a critical component of beliefs about social class. We developed the Systems and Individual Responsibility for Poverty (SIRP) Scale to address this gap. This article describes the development of an initial pool of 20 items, and then the refinement and validation of the final 17‐item measure. Exploratory factor analysis (N = 260) and confirmatory factor analysis (N = 280) yielded 2 factors: Individual Responsibility and Systems Responsibility. The Individual Responsibility factor comprises two subscales, differentiating between reasons for getting into and not getting out of poverty. The SIRP is a new tool for evaluating community psychologists’ efforts to shift deficit‐oriented thinking about poverty, and is likely to be particularly useful in education contexts. In future work, community psychologists might adapt the measure to assess deficit oriented thinking about other problems, and to explore how such attitudes are related to behavior.

Experiencing visions of Canadian church workers: Exploring the mentality fueling systems involved in poverty reduction

“…Psychological research sometimes commits what Shinn and Toohey (2003) refer to as the "context-minimization error": disproportionate focus on individualist mental models that can bypass the wider contextual situatedness of phenomena. Community psychologists are aware of the importance of developing approaches that account for the systems and not just individualist mechanisms because, as framed by Janzen et al (2007) people are always embedded in a world of local systems (Shor et al, 2018). Addressing systems is about community change that enables sustainable outcomes that are good for persons and promotes resource equitability that can enhance human flourishing (Behrens & Foster-Fishmann, 2007).…”

Attitude Change and Action in a Course Aiming for the Social Justice Turn

“…sibility for Poverty (SIRP) Scale is a 17-item measure developed by a subset of the authors to assess attitudes regarding poverty (Shor et al, 2018). The two subscales, which loaded as two separate factors in prior work, measure attributions of poverty to individual-level causes (e.g., "If you are experiencing poverty in the United States, it is the result of your own skills and abilities") or systemic causes (e.g., "If you are experiencing poverty in the United States, it is the result of problems in our system of education"), respectively.…”