There are three main arguments believed to be the explanations for the existence and persistence of poverty. The first account is the Dependency-Based Explanation that puts the blame of poverty to the individual or to their cultural background. The Exclusion-Based Explanation and Structural-Based Explanation are the next two which establishes the society that condemns people to poverty.
Dependency-based Explanation
Individual Deficiency. This explanation views that poverty is caused by the individual’s choice. Influenced by New Right idealism, David Marsland (1997) coined the term ‘individual deficiency’ that relates to the dependency of the poor people to the welfare state. The generosity of the welfare state is being challenged in this view because of the dependency culture it created among people who abandon their will to work to improve their situation. Marsland strongly recommended the use of means testing where the benefits to be given would be based from the assessment of incomes and savings. This is to prevent undeserving people to get assistance that they can provide for themselves.
Culture of Poverty. In his study entitled ‘La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture Poverty’, Oscar Lewis (1966) explained the second approach of dependency-based explanation which is dependency culture. He made a research among the urban poor of Mexico and Puerto Rico in the 1950s. He found out that poor people in a class-stratified society were likely to develop a set of
Individuals struggling to keep adequate shelter. Some may face challenges of seeking medical attention. Others have no access to jobs or schools. Some parents fail daily in providing food and water for their children. These are just a few sentences that describe poverty. If we closed our eyes and envisioned poverty, we think of children in the second-largest continent, Africa, standing around with no clothes or shoes on. We think of the kids looking mal-nutritious or with other sicknesses and flies flying around their faces but they are too weak to brush them away. We think of people with no education, no skills, or no ideas. These statements are far from facts. I will take you through the ongoing issue of poverty from a macro-level and show you how it can affect case management. Then I will take you through the case management process of trying to end poverty.
We create this society in which every individual starts off at different points in life due to these social categories based on race and ethnicity, which in turn affects education, social class and our overall lifestyle. After we create these categories and put people there unwillingly, we act as though it is there fault and not ours, so our society is reluctant to help; in this way it would be a “helping hand” rather than a dependency people often associate it with. “Education is a significant factor in poverty” (Wong, Chapter 6); like stated above, different individuals get different starting points in life, therefore affecting where one ends up in life. “A national survey conducted in 1975, found that those living in poverty attributed it to personal failures, such as having a poor work ethic, poor money management skills and low personal moral values” (Martin
Poverty can be defined as the condition where people basic need for shelter, food, and clothing are not being met. Whereas Jensen (2009 ) define poverty as a chronic and debilitating condition that results from multiple adverse synergistic risk factors and affect the mind, body and soul. Jensen (2009) has identified six types of poverty. The six types of poverty are situational, generational, absolute, relative, urban and rural poverty. Situational is caused by a sudden crisis or loss and is often temporary. Generational is when two generation within the family have been born into poverty. Absolute involves a scarcity of
Identifies skills, theories of change, program designs, partnerships, and ways of building schools where students achieve.
Poverty is a major problem in the United States today. Social, economic, political, and cultural factors all contribute to poverty. Culture of poverty is the argument that poor people adopt certain practices that differ from those of middle-class in order to adapt and survive in difficult economic circumstances. According to the culture poverty theory once these survival adaptations are in place they take on a life of their own and can hold people back (Conley, 2013).
Many theories have been offered to explain the nature of poverty and identify why so many individuals are impoverished in the United States, including individualism, social structuralism, culture of poverty, and fatalism (Seccombe, 2011). An individualistic perspective suggests that poverty is primarily a result of personal failings, and individuals in poverty only have themselves to blame (Seccombe, 2011). The key feature of individualism is on the individual with the thought that the individual themselves need to be more productive. Little to no attention is given to features of our society such as the large number of service industry jobs paying a minimum hourly rate too low to support a family (Seccombe, 2011). In contrast to individualism,
The culture of poverty can be defined as, “the poor qualitatively different in values and lifestyles from the rest of and that these cultural differences explain cultural differences” (Stanley Eitzen 171). It was this belief that caused many to argue for reform in the welfare system. The government believed the poor were becoming too dependent on the system and transmitting the same lifestyle and tendencies to their children. Therefore, by reforming the welfare system it would teach many of the poor to value work. Michael Harrington refutes this claim he states, “Poverty is culture in the sense that the mechanism of impoverishment is fundamentally the same in every part of the system.
This review is formulated with scholarly sources and references based off of poverty in America. This disclosure is approached with a value free sociological approach, and it will give insight on the social causes of poverty and the effects it has on America. Poverty is a very controversial topic. Many will assume that people living in poverty are lazy, made bad life decisions, or that they are solely the reason for their predicament however, people living in poverty would argue that their are deeper issues for it. Poverty will be deeply explained and researched from both perspectives
What is a Social Problem? A social problem is a general factor that affects society. It is a problem affecting a certain group or area of people. I chose poverty as my social problem for this paper. What is poverty? Poverty is the state of being poor. It has many forms, from living in a house with just enough money to get by, to living on the street. Poverty can affect you in many ways. It can affect your health and your education. Many people that live in poverty currently probably didn’t get a proper education. Which means they probably grew up in poverty or got affected by poverty in some way.
As a main theme in Hunger and Shame, child malnutrition is a serious problem that has affected many different societies. Child malnutrition is a complicated concept that often has many causes; each society is different and must be studied closely to fully understand the reason for such a horrific epidemic. Focusing on the Chagga population, many factors catalyzed the epidemic including environmental, cultural, and global.
Poverty for centuries has been a very severe issue that has troubled many nations while impeding economic developments and progress. Poverty stricken countries are majorly concentrated in the continents of Africa and Asia. Continents like the Americas and Europe have globally been recognized as been wealthier yet still many parts of these ostensible countries face massive cases of poverty. Most at times, countries with high populations owing to high birth rates face the most cases of poverty. The definition of poverty can be boundless in the sense that poverty entails so many subsections as it sometimes gets complicated to group everything under one umbrella. Society tends to focus more on the tangible aspects of poverty because many people associate poverty with lacking money and it makes sense because poverty in terms of lacking money is a major problem affecting almost every country in the world. Even though it is debatable that poverty can be physical, intellectual, spiritual and even emotional, it is best to talk about the lack of money and economic developments in this essay. With reference to the oxford English Dictionary, poverty is state of being extremely poor and the state of being inferior in quality or insufficient in amount. Reflecting on this definition given, I deduced that malnutrition and hunger can define poverty. In the light of this, I think poverty is lacking a comfortable place of shelter, being ill and not having access to a better
In today's world, some only have one reason on how poverty can be explained but there are certain psychology methods that can go into depth on poverty. Throughout all the different types of countries they all experience the struggle of their economy and people being in poverty. There are different perspectives that poverty can be possibly explained and why it happens in the world. People have been announcing and declaring different possibilities on how poverty is in the world; ranging from 1938 to 1989. The different perspectives of psychology are psychoanalytic, behavioral, humanistic, cognitive, biological, and sociocultural.
When it comes to poverty, there is the magnitude of definitions explaining the term. The definition of poverty has important implications from point of view of policy making, politics and academic debates. Each view has its own value judgments and explanations. Over the times, new definitions have surfaced the debates and yet, there is not a single universally acceptable definition of poverty. Definitions usually set the perimeters of the terminology and often subject to limitations and criticism. According to the definition of the World Bank, the term lack refers to the scarcity of economic resources while the term inability refers to the failure of competence to take part in a community (Bellu & Liberati, 2005). It is now widely
Poverty is “the state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of support; condition of being poor” (Dictionary.com, 2017). Based off this definition poverty is a condition that can cause a cascade of cause and effect actions that is detrimental to families and individuals both physically and mentally. Haan, Kaplan, & Camacho (2017) completed a study on the correlation between social and economic status and health in adults in Oakland, CA. They found that the lower the socioeconomic class the higher incidents of diseases and deaths related to chronic diseases (p.1161-1162). Just being without money or little money was not the only indication of health indication, a person living in an area with higher poverty issues
A social problem, is “a general factor that effects and damages society”. It can be used to describe an issue or a problem within a certain group of people or an area in the world. Examples of contemporary social problems today include anti-social behaviour, drug abuse, and sexual abuse. Poverty is an example of a social problem that exists all over the world, and to different extents. In the UK, poverty has effected at least a third of the population, as shown by the Office of National Statistics, providing evidence that it is a massive social problem in the country. Tameside has a big poverty problem. 1 in 4 children in Tameside are born into poverty, and workers in Tameside earn significantly less than other workers in the rest of the North-West area. In addition, Tameside has the largest proportion of people claiming unemployment benefits compared to the rest of the North West of England.