Subjective Quality of Life in the Psychology of Poverty

Abstract

The article presents a theoretical introduction to the discussion of the subjective quality of life for carriers of psychology of poverty. We revealed the socio-cultural determinants of subjective quality of life, systematize its psychological components and factors of its high level. We describe a set of characteristics of psychology of poverty, including the sense of displacement from normal life, hopelessness, fatalism, deprivation, social envy, metapathology of personality, lack of subjectivity, responsibility, an outsider position, survivor guilt complex, and so on. On the criterion of the relationship to own life we revealed types of carriers of psychology of poverty: a passive-contemplative, passive-aggressive, pseudocompensatory-devalued, infantile, anomic. We analyzed the specificity of reflection and benchmarking of carriers of psychology of poverty as a cognitive and affective strategies to assess the quality of own lives, focused on the maintenance of self-esteem

Keywords

• subjective quality of life
• culture of poverty
• psychology of poverty
• deprivation
• relative deprivation
• reflection
• benchmarking