Being and Becoming Poor: How Cultural Schemas Shape Beliefs About Poverty

Abstract

Prior research on stratification beliefs has investigated individuals' understandings regarding the causes of poverty in America. These past studies have uncovered demographic characteristics associated with individualist and structuralist explanations for poverty. In the current study, we will argue that Americans, like social scientists, envision poverty as a heterogeneous and complex phenomenon. We utilize a cultural cognition theoretical approach to conceptualize these understandings of poverty as schemas. We contend that a schema of poverty contains a set of unique associations regarding both demographic beliefs (who the poor are) and causal attributions (why they are poor). Using original data in a mixed-methods design that incorporates inductive and experimental components, we find that people differentiate between two key types of poverty: intergenerational poverty and downward mobility. People perceive each type of poverty as caused by a different set of factors and as experienced by a different group of people. The type of poverty envisioned is, in most cases, as important as or more important than a respondent's own demographic characteristics in predicting what type of causal attributions he or she makes for poverty. These findings underscore the importance of investigating different schemas of poverty in future stratification beliefs research.The authors wish to thank Mark Chaves, who supervised this project as part of the Logic of Inquiry course at Duke University. This study would not have been possible without his guidance and generous provision of funding. The authors also wish to thank Lynn Smith-Lovin for her support of this research project. Naomi Quinn and Claudia Strauss also provided eminently helpful feedback on this paper. We address this gap in the literature through a two-stage mixed-methods design. First, we inductively assess people's understandings of poverty using structured interviews. Next, we use these interviews to construct a survey that includes new items of poverty beliefs that reflect both interviewees' understandings of poverty and empirical facts about poverty from the current sociological literature on stratification.Finally, we utilize the theoretical concept of cultural schemas to identify the constituent parts of beliefs about poverty. To do so, we rely on the connectionist theory of cognition, which implies that individuals have mental models that are and Tranby 2007), we are, to our knowledge, the first to operationalize and apply the insights of schema theory to beliefs about poverty. In their foundational work on stratification beliefs, Kluegel and Smith (1986, 16) briefly mention schemas and suggest how they may be relevant to beliefs about poverty, but this aspect of their work has remained largely undeveloped. We concretize schemas of poverty as shared mental models of who is poor and why they are poor. We then demonstrate that people's perceptions regarding types of poverty differ in these two key respects, employing a survey-experiment to show that this is t...

Mapping Cultural Schemas: From Theory to Method

“…Like meaning, these elements are theorized as predicated upon schematic associations (D'Andrade 1995;Strauss and Quinn 1997). This insight regarding the link between schemas and beliefs, attitudes, and preferences has provided motivation for numerous studies using attitude or belief measures as indicators for cultural schemas (Baldassarri and Goldberg 2014; Bonikowski and DiMaggio 2016; Boutyline 2017; Boutyline and Vaisey 2017;Farrell 2011;Goldberg 2011;Homan et al 2017;Vaisey 2009).…”

“…The method we propose is content agnostic-and so could be used to study schemas in any domain of interest to researchers-but as an initial validation test case, we examine U.S. liberal and conservative schemas of poverty. We chose this case because extensive sociological research on this topic (Baldassarri and Gelman 2008;DiMaggio, Evans, and Bryson 1996;Gilens 2000;Homan, Valentino, and Weed 2017;Manza and Brooks 1999;Merolla, Hunt, and Serpe 2011) provides a useful baseline to gauge the method's ability to capture expected patterns of associations.…”

A Silver Lining: The Role of Optimism in Overcoming Poverty in Early Life

“…For example, as discovered in Homan et al's study 2017, people form schemas to differentiate between who is poor and why they are poor as to whether their poverty is intergenerational (born poor) or downward mobility (became poor) with individualism, interactionism and structuralism as possible causes. They also found that people believe Blacks, Latinos, immigrants, teens and adults to be more likely to experience downward mobility and whites, non-immigrants, elderly and children are more likely to be intergenerationally poor (Homan et al 2017). Schemas around poverty, educational attainment and success may form impressions on individuals and their attributions for their own background or adult outcomes.…”

“…Researchers have delved little into how adversity and its association with resilient, optimistic attitudes may influence other aspects of adulthood. For example, studies (Bloome 2017;Breyerton 2016;Homan et al 2017;Johnson and Hitlin 2017) have examined how early life adversity influence outlooks or perceptions on adult life, but have not looked further into how specific adverse events, like low levels of family income or poverty, shape perceptions which in turn, affect life successes. This study examines only how the outlooks of respondents from disadvantaged family income backgrounds, specifically of far below average or below average levels, influence income in adulthood.…”

“…These differences in developmental or demographic resources contribute to variance in social capital, inequality, social stratification and mobility over time (Lerman et al 2017;Alvarado 2018). They shape the individual's outlook on their past, present and future; their attributions for their financial standing, and their perceptions of success (Schafer et al 2011;Johnson and Hitlin 2017;Homan et al 2017). I utilize the same cumulative inequality framework Schafer et al (2011) argue in their study on early life adversity and life expectations to argue for the influential role of optimistic outlook in possibly disrupting some of the ongoing effects of inequality through the empowerment of the agentic self.…”