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

Abstract

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.