Study: Women's View About Why People Stay in a Life of Poverty

Webster's Dictionary defines poverty as "the state or condition of being poor; lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts and also the lack of something necessary or desirable." Poverty exists for many reasons within the United States and throughout the world. During my life I have heard many opinions about the cause of poverty. My opinions on the causes include lack of motivation and insufficient financial resources. Also, some children are left parentless and they are on their own trying to survive. People living within poverty are treated harshly for the most part, and some are even called deviants, or "pariahs of society." They are sometimes seen as a menace to society. I wanted to examine teachers' opinions on the causes of poverty because they have insight due to being exposed to children from many economic backgrounds. I chose to write this survey because I wanted to get some insights into teachers' attitudes about poverty. The teacher's answers to this survey displayed four significant contributors.

I distributed twenty-five copies of my survey, and fifteen were returned. This survey, consisting of twenty questions, was distributed to women to see their views on the topic of poverty within the United States. I received many responses and on some items there was considerable agreement while on others responses varied drastically. Some of the respondents made changes to the survey to fit their needs, or to make it more understandable or easier for them to answer. Their changes make it a little harder to analyze on my part. The survey was taken by teachers; conducted at a local elementary school. The survey was created and revised approximately three times. The first portion of the survey, questions one through six (which was also analyzed, but is not represented graphically in this report), I consider to be the 'warm-up,' getting the women to think about the topic in depth. I hypothesized that the women would conform to one main view. However, the results varied widely. The women, I thought, would see the poor as miscreants, or the unfortunate people within society. Some people clearly stated on the survey that the people to blame for poverty were the poor themselves. It makes one think...

The women said by the survey, the four contributors are a lack of education, social and political reasons, no financial support, and mental illness. They believe that the people to blame for poverty are the government and the poor themselves, which I found rather interesting. When they offered their own thoughts in the "other spot" portion of the survey, they came up with extremely interesting ideas, that I have never thought about before. To alleviate poverty in the United States, a small number of them wrote down education. Everyone agreed that poverty is a global problem that needs to be solved and indeed it is.

I learned that conducting a study, in which people would follow the survey to the letter, is very difficult because they want to express themselves more so than what the survey might reveal. They wanted to make sure that they elaborated on their answers, instead of giving a yes or no answer, although a few people did. I discovered that trying to get into the minds of some people can be fun, but it is very difficult to comprehend. Being a sociologist for a little while is fun, but being one for a job would seem very challenging to me.

Source: http://www.homestead.com/_poverty/files/starting_page.htm