El estigma a la pobreza y su relación con las trayectorias económicas individuales

This paper studies poverty stigma and its relationship with income and social assistance recipiency trajectories, as well as the mediating role of beliefs regarding ways of achieving individual success and well-being. We use longitudinal survey data from Uruguay coming from the 2004, 2011/12 and 2015/17 waves of Estudio Longitudinal del Bienestar en Uruguay. First, we conduct a psychometric validation of poverty shame and shame proneness survey modules proposed by Zavaleta (2007). By carrying out exploratory and confirmatory statistical analyses, we find that only the shame proneness component possesses desirable psychometric properties, and thus construct a shame proneness index and analyze its correlation with multiple socioeconomic characteristics. Shame proneness is unequally distributed among the population, as it is negatively associated with household income, educational level, and employment status of the household head, while it is positively related to Afro-Uruguayan ethnicity, being a woman, region of residence, and personality traits (as of the Big Five Inventory). We further investigate the determinants of shame proneness and find that shame proneness is negatively associated with past and present income, past and present poverty and extreme poverty, and past and present recipiency of social assistance. Moreover, we find that these correlations are stronger when individuals believe that individual success is mostly determined by hard work instead of luck. Although these findings require further study, they open up avenues for discussion on which ways redistributive and poverty alleviating policies should be framed.