Causal Attributions for Poverty among Adults In Nekemte Town, Oromia Region
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Date
2008-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The study of causal attributions for poverty did not get much attention from
psychological point of view. The purpose of this study is to investigate causal attributions
for poverty among adults in Nekemte town. To accomplish this purpose, questionnaire
was distributed to 410 participants out of whom the 400 questionnaires were found to be
usable and analyzed.
To see the relative importance of the dimensions of causal attributions for poverty, the
means of scores of responses were computed for each dimension. Accordingly, the means
of individualistic, structuralistic and fatalistic attribution was 1.98, 3.91 and 2.91
respectively. This implies that the adults generally attributed poverty to structuralistic
than to individualistic and fatalistic dimensions.
The analysis of t-test revealed that there is no significant difference between males and
females in making causal attributions for poverty on the three dimensions.
While there are no significant differences among the adults from three age groups and
four religious affiliations in making causal attributions for poverty, One-way ANOV A
showed that adults with bachelor degree and above attributed poverty to individualistic
than their counterparts did (F (5,394)=10.55, p<. 05). In this study, while individuals with
high professional and administrative occupational statuses attributed poverty to
individualistic dimension, the lower occupational statuses gave more structuralsitic
explanation for poverty. The open-ended question analysis generally showed that the
adults made structuralsitic attribution for poverty; especially unemployment of youth. On
the basis of the finding, the researcher recommends that there is a need to encourage the
adults to take responsibility in trying to reduce poverty through their active participation
and hard working. Moreover, government and NGOs dealing with poverty alleviation
should arrange informal education program that encourage and help them have internal
locus of control.
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causal attributions for poverty did not get much