This study was about the reaction of disadvantaged groups and persons to inequality and deprivation. Set in Badia, a low income community in Lagos, Nigeria, it investigates the main effects of community members’ attributions of causes of poverty in motivating or impeding their reaction to inequality. Relative Deprivation (RD) theory proposed that dissatisfaction with social outcomes depend on subjective feelings rather than objective criteria. However scholars found empirical difficulties in predicting collective action on the basis of RD. Resource Mobilization proponents argued on the contrary that feelings are not salient within the framework of action. The infusion of Social Identity Theory (SIT) into RD research however resolved the paradox of action with SIT’s argument that action was contingent upon the perception of permeability and legitimacy of inter-group structures. However, despite successes of SIT, scholars found that it was unable to predict the type of actions group members will take in response to injustice and the nature of possible actions. Propositions of RD and SIT were therefore suitable for integration into the proposition of Taylor & McKirnan’s (1984) Five Stage Model (FSM) of inter-group relations that reactions to RD feelings were predicated upon the dynamics of the social philosophy guiding stratification. Using an integrated RD, SIT and FSM framework, this study shows how disadvantaged group members’ responses to deprivation proceeded as predicted by the FSM from mutual acceptance to collective action mediated by their perception of causes of poverty. This complements the trend in the literature on reaction to inequality and it's almost ii exclusive focus on instrumental and affective concerns while neglecting the role of consensually shared beliefs in motivating or impeding action and willingness to act in response to injustice. The study hypothesized that the pattern of causal attributions of poverty of respondents will shape their ‘predisposition to act’ and the type of action they would engage in. The main hypothesis of the study therefore was that poverty attribution mediates the relationship between ‘feelings of injustice’ and ‘reaction to inequality’. For instance where respondents attribute poverty to individual or fatalistic factors they will adopt individual action whereas where attributions are structural, responses will be collective, where feelings of injustice were present. A survey was conducted using a five-level Likert scale to decipher respondents’ perceptions of feelings of injustice, their causal attribution of poverty, their levels of willingness to embark on collective action and actions taken in the preceding year. In the first stage of analysis, responses (n = 383) were reduced using Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to determine how questionnaire items contributed to variables under consideration. Subsequently, variables extracted were correlated and regressed. While bivariate correlation was used to test simple relationships between variables, a stepwise hierarchical regression analysis was used to decipher how sub-dimensions of poverty attribution mediate the relationship between respondents’ feelings of injustice and their willingness to embark on collective action entering variables in succession into the regression equation. Furthermore, a 1 x 3 x 5 Multivariate Analysis of Covariance (MANCOVA) was used to test the mediation effects of poverty attribution sub-dimensions on the relationship between injustice feelings and actions. The results showed iii that structural attribution was the preferred explanation for poverty among Badia residents, as this explanation was preferred by a majority of the respondents. It was also shown that while 96.9% of respondents used more than one causal attribution, a majority of structural attributors adopted fatalistic attribution as second choice of explanation for poverty. On the basis of the above, and in line with previous studies (Mann, 1970; Bobo, 1991), it was deduced that the possibility for radical action would be diminished as a result of this ‘dual/split consciousness’. The result further confirmed as hypothesized, that fatalistic attribution had a negative correlation with willingness to embark on collective action as respondents in the fatalistic condition were not willing to embark on collective action. However, respondents in the structural conditions were more willing to engage in collective action. While attributions predicted willingness to embark on collective action, MANCOVA showed that action proceeded in a continuum as predicted by the FSM. For example, while the introduction of fatalistic and individual attribution to the equation hypothesizing the relationship between injustice feelings and action showed that resultant actions were predominantly individual normative, post-hoc inclusion of the structural dimension to the equation showed an addition variance to the equation for collective action. This indicated that structural attributions enhance collective normative action. However, consistent with most studies in the literature, the results did not predict collective non-normative action1. Results indicated low adherence of subject to items eliciting collective action suggesting that past studies which reported high preference of collective action by disadvantaged groups may have been influenced by ‘social desirability effects’, given Topf’s (1995) assertion that what people say they will do is often not what they do but what they perceive as right in the particular situation. 1 The only notable exception is Boen & Vanbeselaere (1998) 2 A full discussion of lay explanations of poverty is reserved for chapter 4 of this thesis. iv The study however proposed on the basis of the salience of structural attributions that poverty attributions may become useful for Social Movement Organizations (SMOs) interested in fostering social change. However, while the study showed that attribution influences willingness to embark on action it does not show how attribution becomes salient in group membership. Thus there is a need for future studies to investigate how attribution affects group identification. Similarly, given the dearth of studies of the attribution of the ‘actual poor’ of poverty, it is necessary for future studies to test the validity of the result from the present study indicating stronger adherence to fatalistic than individualistic attributions of poverty among the disadvantaged. While many past studies of attribution and those of reaction to injustice have been on samples of middle-class adults in developed countries, or artificially created deprived groups, the present study being of the ‘real life’ poor in a Third World setting, provides evidence of ‘real world’ actions and attributions of people experiencing poverty.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ufh/vital:11951 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Ige, Kehinde Davies |
| Publisher | University of Fort Hare, Faculty of Social Sciences & Humanities |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Doctoral, PhD (Sociology) |
| Format | xxvii, 466 leaves; 30 cm, pdf |
| Rights | University of Fort Hare |
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