Children's and Adolescents' Concepts of Poverty: Association with Cognitive Development and Social Disadvantage

Children’s and adolescents’ concepts of poverty and the factors that influence young people’s concepts of poverty were investigated. Ninety-five young people (M=10.26, SD=2.08) answered questions about the nature, causes, justification, and alleviation of poverty. Young people’s parents answered questions about their family’s economic, social and community circumstances. Younger children were more likely to attribute poverty to societal factors, whilst older children and adolescents were more likely to have mixed concepts of poverty, attributing poverty to both individual and societal factors. Children and adolescents from ‘poor’ families gave mixed reasons, whilst those from ‘non-poor’ families reported structuralist reasons about the fairness of poverty. Findings offer direction for the design and implementation of programmes to alleviate poverty based on a multidimensional measurement of poverty. In addition, results may inform the development of effective school-based social justice curricula to promote balanced discussion of the causes of poverty in Australian schools.