Good observation Trish.
I agree with the individual capacity to process/accept change comment. A few years back, in an effort to assist multi-sectoral partners to understand the experience of poverty, we hosted a Bridges Out of Poverty workshop in Lethbridge (via one of the Canadian affiliatiates fwith US based educator Dr. Ruby Payne's work). It was a day long event in the previous Chinook Health Region in southwestern Alberta via our then poverty coalition with participants from various sectors-but mostly health. It was an eye opening experience for many who had not realized the hidden rules of social class (or perhaps culture)-particularly among those experiencing poverty.
I would not say that I agree with all of Payne's approaches in the Canadian context. However, simply opening the minds of healthcare workers to the day to day survival mechanisms and reliance on seemingly "got your back" relationships with others was helpful for participants and moving forward with our then work on poverty reduction in southwest rural Alberta.
To leave any grouping that one is familiar with-organizational, social or economic can be frightening and is not without loss. According to Payne's work, relationships are essential for survival. Anecdotally, I have observed that leaving those groups can perhaps elicit fear of the "crab mentality"-particulary among First Nations people I know well and live among.
Essentially the crab mentality refers to "an interesting phenomenon which occurs in buckets of crabs. If one crab attempts to escape from a bucket of live crabs, the other crabs will pull it back down, rather than allowing it to get free. Sometimes, the crabs seem almost malicious, waiting until the crab has almost escaped before yanking it back into the pot." http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-crab-mentality.htm
(apologies for the non-academic citation)
The crab mentality can be thought of as a reflection of the famous saying “we all like to see our friends get ahead, but not too far ahead.”
More food for thought...there is much more to this to be explored via further study and perhaps simply listening to the stories of the poor.
Regards,
Stasha Donahue
________________________________
From: Social Determinants of Health [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Patricia Paton
Sent: November 4, 2011 3:01 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SDOH] "Why can't more poor people escape poverty?"
Also relevant was a piece from a while ago around change - essentially, the argument was that people at work resist change, or change stalls, at least in part because individual capacity to process/accept change is finite. Pasted a bit of it here with link to both a video and a written piece. All of it worth thinking critically about, even if to improve what sometimes seems like increasingly sophisticated "blame the individual" approaches. Or research that can be interpreted that way by those who choose to do so.
Trish
Trish Paton
Knowledge Management Consultant
403-502-8648 x 1590
===========================
This brings us back to the point I promised I’d make: That what looks like laziness is often exhaustion. Change wears people out—even well-intentioned people will simply run out of fuel.
http://www.fastcompany.com/video/why-change-is-so-hard-self-control-is-exhaustible?partner=homepage_newsletter
From: Social Determinants of Health [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Emily Holton
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2011 10:35 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [SDOH] "Why can't more poor people escape poverty?"
I found this article interesting - I thought I'd share it because it reminds me of the discussion that took place on this listserv earlier this year re. how traditional health reporting places the most importance on individual behaviours rather than SDOH. To me, it feels like the author of this article may have missed the point in the same way, flouting "promising" interventions that target the effects of unfair social conditions, rather than the conditions themselves. In this case, he argues for programs "to circumvent self-control failure"! Yet the research is interesting - and disturbing.
Why Can’t More Poor People Escape Poverty?
In addition to all the structural barriers that prevent even determined poor people from escaping poverty, there may be another, deeper, and considerably more disturbing barrier: Poverty may reduce free will, making it even harder for the poor to escape their circumstances. All of this suggests that we need to rethink our approaches to poverty reduction. Many of our current anti-poverty efforts focus on access to health, educational, agricultural, and financial services. Now, it seems, we need to start treating willpower as a scarce and important resource as well.
http://www.tnr.com/article/environment-energy/89377/poverty-escape-psychology-self-control?page=0,0
---------------------------------
Emily Holton
Knowledge Transfer Specialist
Centre for Research on Inner City Health
Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, St. Michael's Hospital
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