Mississippi Social Workers’ Attitudes Toward Poverty and the Poor

Influencing Student Beliefs about Poverty and Health through Interprofessional Community-Based Educational Experiences

“…Although the change in APS score was small, we suggest that it is meaningful for two reasons. First, our participants started the project with strongly positive attitudes, with a mean (standard deviation in parentheses) of 134.1 (13.5), compared with 110.4 (14.7) for 113 American undergraduate students taking a course in business administration [12], 119.6 (21.9) for 98 American undergraduate students taking courses in sociology or social work [12], 125.5 (16.7) for 740 Canadian undergraduate nursing students [14], and 130.3 (19.9) for 180 Mississippi social workers [16]. The second reason for considering this change in attitude meaningful is that it was in the opposite direction than one would expect from simple regression to the mean.…”

Intergenerational Transmission of Attitudes toward Poverty in Israel: A Comparison between Three Generations Families’ of Jewish and Arab Social Work Students

“…Perceptions of and attitudes towards poverty affect the manner in which the difficulties of the poor are understood and defined, including the agents that caused their state of poverty and the agents responsible for helping them deal with their situation. The overall approach to the issue of poverty is -for the most part-socially based; it contributes to creating the political climate that regulates the degree of a society's humanization or dehumanization of poverty, and thus its feelings of sympathy or hostility, empathy or anomalism towards the poor themselves (Reeser & Epstein, 1987;Rehner, 1997).…”

Analyzing the Attitude of Undergraduate Students Toward Poverty and Impoverished Persons: Does Social Work Education Make a Difference?

“…The means by which social workers perceive social issues, including poverty, influences how they frame client problems and intervene to address them (Rehner et al, 1997). Thus, the efforts of social work educators to instill in future social workers a greater awareness of the social structures that engender poverty may eventually lead to interventions that reduce social hardship and privation.…”

“…For example, one of the leading ways for addressing the pervasive poverty that existed at the onset of the 20th century was the private charity movement. The main responsibility of charity workers, who later became known as social workers, was to assess the needs of the poor and provide them with resources (L. C. Johnson & Schwartz, 1997;Rehner, Ishee, Sallour, & Velasques, 1997;Tucker, Garvin, & Sarri, 1997).…”