Chinese adolescents' explanations of poverty: the Perceived Causes of Poverty Scale

The Chinese Perceived Causes of Poverty Scale (CPCPS), constructed to assess how Chinese people explain poverty, covers four categories of explanations: personal problems of poor people, lack of opportunities to escape from the poverty cycle, exploitation of poor people, and bad fate. Chinese secondary school students (N = 1,519) were administered the CPCPS. Four factors were abstracted from their responses (Personal Problems, Lack of Opportunity, Exploitation, and Fate) and these factors (i.e., subscales) could reliably be reproduced in different subsamples. The four subscales were also found to be internally consistent and there was some support for their construct validity.