The development of the Systems and Individual Responsibility for Poverty (SIRP) Scale

Poverty is a widespread social problem that affects a substantial number of Americans each year. Attitudes can affect a range of judgments, behavioral intentions, and actions related to addressing this problem. However, existing tools that measure attitudes toward those in poverty do not fully capture the deficit ideology that is a critical component of beliefs about social class. We developed the Systems and Individual Responsibility for Poverty (SIRP) Scale to address this gap. This article describes the development of an initial pool of 20 items, and then the refinement and validation of the final 17-item measure. Exploratory factor analysis (N = 260) and confirmatory factor analysis (N = 280) yielded 2 factors: Individual Responsibility and Systems Responsibility. The Individual Responsibility factor comprises two subscales, differentiating between reasons for getting into and not getting out of poverty. The SIRP is a new tool for evaluating community psychologists' efforts to shift deficit-oriented thinking about poverty, and is likely to be particularly useful in education contexts. In future work, community psychologists might adapt the measure to assess deficit oriented thinking about other problems, and to explore how such attitudes are related to behavior.