IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/eme/reinzz/s1049-258520140000022008.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Perception of Income Inequality: A Multidimensional Scaling Study

In: Economic Well-Being and Inequality: Papers from the Fifth ECINEQ Meeting

Author

Listed:
  • Barbara Jancewicz

Abstract

Existing research shows that popular income inequality measures fail to reflect their respondents’ perceptions of income inequality. However, most of the current literature focuses on what is negative, telling us what individuals do not perceive. This paper presents an alternative methodology to help uncover actual perceptions of inequality, how people perceive inequality instead of how they don’t. Multidimensional scaling, a statistical tool for visualizing dissimilarity data as a low-dimensional map, is used on results of a simple grouping task with a given distribution set. The outcome is a perception map that presents respondents’ answers spatially, which enables additional insight into respondents’ thinking. The map created by the respondents’ replies, presented in this paper, indicates that their decisions are driven by two factors: what the biggest gap in incomes of a given distribution is and whether some groups have equal incomes. The result additionally validates multidimensional scaling as a tool for measuring income inequality perception and opens new ways of improving inequality perception questionnaires.

Suggested Citation

  • Barbara Jancewicz, 2014. "Perception of Income Inequality: A Multidimensional Scaling Study," Research on Economic Inequality, in: Economic Well-Being and Inequality: Papers from the Fifth ECINEQ Meeting, volume 22, pages 251-272, Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
    • Handle: RePEc:eme:reinzz:s1049-258520140000022008
    DOI: 10.1108/S1049-258520140000022008
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/S1049-258520140000022008/full/html?utm_source=repec&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=repec
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/S1049-258520140000022008/full/pdf?utm_source=repec&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=repec
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/S1049-258520140000022008/full/epub?utm_source=repec&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=repec&title=10.1108/S1049-258520140000022008
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1108/S1049-258520140000022008?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Clark, Andrew E. & D'Ambrosio, Conchita, 2014. "Attitudes to Income Inequality: Experimental and Survey Evidence," IZA Discussion Papers 8136, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Income inequality; inequality; inequality axioms; questionnaire experiments; transfer principle; income transformations; D63;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eme:reinzz:s1049-258520140000022008. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Emerald Support (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.