The Social Psychology of Poverty

Amelioration of poverty is one of the major aims of any healthy society. Society sciences have endeavoured to produce knowledge that can be used to reduce poverty. There is plethora of economic research on poverty However, poverty is not just lack of material resources, it is also an experiential phenomenon. The Social Psychology of Poverty focuses on individual and social processes occurring under the conditions of poverty. The author has argued that poverty is not only with people, but is also in their mind, therefore, amelioration of poverty also required social psychological intervention. The author has discussed the concept of poverty in different social sciences and critically examined its use in each discipline. Further, different social psychological theories of poverty are presented and their implications for policy making and intervention strategies are highlighted. An attempt has been made to elaborate how laymen explain poverty and what are the implications of these explanations. In addition, author has documented deleterious effects of poverty on cognitive, affective, and conative processes. An empirical study is presented to examine how poverty affects coping with the economic problems and how social support moderates the poverty coping relationship. The findings reveal that the poor applied greater coping to deal with the economic problems. However, social support did not moderate the poverty-coping relationship.