فشار اقتصادی و طرد اجتماعی در اروپا

This study examines people's perceptions of poverty and social exclusion in 12 countries in Europe: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Data come from the 1993 Euro-barometer and a model of the dynamics among feelings of social exclusion, community poverty and social exclusion, and economic pressure was tested for the goodness-of-fit using structural equation models (AMOS 4.0) techniques by the method of maximum likelihood. The goodness-of-fit provided evidence that the hypothesized model was stable. The results also showed significant differences in the attitudes toward poverty and social exclusion according to country of residence, gender, and age of the participants.

Poverty and social exclusion are important issues in the contemporary international debates. In the past two decades, poverty appears to have become more difficult to escape, being more chronic and less transitory (Rodgers & Rodgers, 1993). Persistent poverty is more deleterious to children's development and home environments than is transitory poverty and research indicated that neighborhood poverty has adverse effects on children's functioning, independent of family level poverty (Brooks-Gunn, 1995; Duncan & Brooks-Gunn, 1997). There is also a remarkable little consensus among social scientists, politicians or lay people about the nature, causes, or future course of poverty (Jordan, 1996). Social exclusion is a term frequently used in the recent political vocabulary referring to a wide range of social situations and processes, like rupture of social bonds or generalized disadvantage (Dean, 1991). The impact of exclusion from social integration has also negative consequences on individual and family development since an array of psychological problems such as depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, isolation accompanies this process (Goodban, 1985). The purposes of this study are to examine Europeans’ opinions on the causes of poverty, their subjective appraisals of poverty and social exclusion, and the dynamics between these processes.