THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PERCEPTIONS OF THE CAUSES OF POVERTY AND HOUSEHOLD CHARACTERISTICS

Year 2016, Volume: 8 Issue: 2, 129 - 146, 01.12.2016

W.C.J. Grobler S.H. Dunga

Abstract

As pioneered by Feagin (1972), the literature on the theories of poverty focuses on
individualistic, structural and fatalistic causes of poverty. The individualistic
perception blames individuals themselves for their poverty situation. In contrast,
the structural perception of poverty blames society for poverty, while the fatalistic
perception views poverty as merely bad luck. Even although various people have
different perceptions of the causes of poverty, these views typically fall into one
of these three categories. People tend to ascribe to these perceptions mostly
because of their ontological and cosmological views of life, which are influenced
by household characteristics. The purpose of this study was to investigate the
household characteristics that determine perceptions of household heads with
regard to the causes of poverty. Indexes on individualistic, structural and fatalistic
perceptions were calculated for each household and used as dependent variables in
an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression model. The study found that a
household head’s years of schooling, grant recipients and food insecurity were
strong predictors of the structural perception while as regards the individualistic
perception, the study reported a positive strong relationship with the age of the
head of a household, the number of years of schooling received by the head of the
household whereas there was a negative significant relationship with food
insecure households, and also with female heads of household. Fatalistic
perceptions were strongly predicted by food insecurity, grant recipients and years
of schooling of the head of household. The implications of the results are that
policy makers need to first understand the perceptions of the poor before coming
up with mitigating programmes as the perceptions might influence the
effectiveness of the interventions.

Keywords

Food insecurity, gender and poverty, perceptions on poverty, poverty, social welfare

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