If you ain't got no money...
February 1, 2006 1:51 AM

Are there any decent cross-cultural studies on the psychological effects of poverty out there?

I ask out of idle curiousity, no specific projects. I'm just curious what makes people tick in different parts of the world.
posted by saysthis to Human Relations (4 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
The Economist had a recent article (December 20th) comparing the poor in Africa and Appalachia. The poor here are better off but suffer the same psychologically and more in some cases because being confronted with their failure compared to what they see in the media.
posted by JJ86 at 5:55 AM on February 1, 2006


The best thing you can do if you want to read about interesting research is wander into a university's library and don't check anything out (since you can't) - just search the database online, print stuff out, and make copies of articles you find in bound journals on the shelves.

I am a student so I have access to several databases of research articles (such as sociology, psychology). You might want to seek a way to access PsycINFO yourself - I think you might have to pay though, or join APA.

PsycINFO database covers these journals. I will email you some search results.

Also, you can order a sample issue of Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, and it appears you can search for articles on their website as well. Only the abstracts are free, but abstracts can be pretty interesting. Good luck.
posted by mojabunni at 7:53 AM on February 1, 2006


I would use google scholar before rushing off to a university library. Lots of academic types put their papers up on their own web sites, so if you click "Web search" under the article you want, you can sometimes find it somehwere other than the official database.
posted by duck at 8:30 AM on February 1, 2006


Yes, absolutely.

Folks I knew back at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health interested in such things included Mervyn and Ezra Susser, Bruce Link, and Sharon Schwartz. Plug their names into PsycInfo, pick some likely articles, look at the bibliographies, and you're off to the races.

Unsurprisingly, poverty is both a cause and an effect of psychologic illness.
posted by ikkyu2 at 10:14 PM on February 1, 2006


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