Factors Associated with Social Work Students' Attitude Toward Poverty: Social Work Education, Ideology, and Poverty Attribution

Background and Purpose

    A core goal of undergraduate social work education is to enable students to work effectively to address issues of social justice, with a particular focus on issues related to poverty.  As social work education continues to develop in Taiwan, it is essential to assess the degree to which our universities are effectively achieving this goal, and what factors contribute to success (or lack thereof).  Using the attribution theory model proposed by Zucker & Weiner (1993), this study tested a path relationship among social work education, welfare ideology, poverty attribution (individual, cultural, and structural cause of poverty), and attitudes toward poverty.  This research was completed as part of a master thesis under the supervision of Dr. Li-Chen Cheng.

Method

        Sixteen social work departments were randomly selected from a total of 28 departments across Taiwan. 424 social work students were then identified through a stratified random cluster sampling design and invited to participate in the survey.  Attitude toward poverty (the dependent variable) was defined as students’ cognitive, affection, and behavior tendency toward people living in poverty. Independent variables were students’ personal, cultural, and structural poverty attribution.  These were measured through a poverty attribution scale (Robert et al., 2016).  The welfare ideology is a composite of 3 scales that measure the opposition to inequality, government responsibility, and attribution of success.  The social work education variable was defined by students’ learning competency on poverty issues, which represent students’ learning effectiveness and self-efficacy.  Demographic variables consisted of gender and self-reported grades.  A hierarchical multivariate analysis was used to test the causal relationships between independent and dependent variables.  AMOS analysis was also used to test the path relationship among the independent and dependent variables.

Results

     In the correlated analysis, the data indicated no significant difference on students’ attitudes toward poverty between seniors and freshman.  However, the senior students showed significantly lower approval of personal and cultural attribution on poverty, and they expressed higher learning competency on poverty issues. In the multiple regression models, all variables totally explain 38% variance of students’ attitudes toward poverty. As expected, social work students who had higher learning competency on poverty issues, more toward left-winged ideological, higher approval of structural poverty attribution, higher opposition against personal and cultural attribution were positively related to attitudes toward poverty.  In path analysis, the attribution model which posited students’ poverty attribution had a mediate effect on the relationship between students’ welfare ideology and their attitudes toward poverty was also confirmed.

Conclusions

      Results suggest that students’ learning competency (perception of how they learn) on poverty issues plays an important role in cultivating students to be reflective and thoughtful in their poverty attribution and welfare ideology toward people living in poverty. The competency and welfare ideology then indirectly were transformed to enhance their poverty attribution toward more structural explanations and then eventually change their attitudes toward poverty favorably.  The implications about social work education to promote students’ learning competency on poverty issues is included in this paper.