Through the past few decades, Vietnam has experienced fundamental economic, political, and social changes. On the one side, Vietnam has achieved significant improvements in poverty alleviation and social development. On the other hand, Vietnam is facing numerous new challenges due to rapid social change, including poverty, income inequality, family breakdown, rural-urban migration, unemployment, child labor, public health, and environmental pollution. In fact, the vast majority of Vietnam’s remaining poor − 86 percent - are ethnic minorities (WB). In order to solve the social problems due to economic development, one of the solutions is development and professionalization of social work. In 2004, social work was officially recognized as a university discipline in Vietnam and the Ministry of Education and Training approved the national Bachelor of social work curriculum.
The social work profession has important roles in social development, intervening into lives of people, families, social groups, communities because the social work is a profession and not an ideology. According to the National Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics, social workers pursue social change, particularly with and on behalf of vulnerable and oppressed individuals and groups of people. Social workers’ social change efforts are focused primarily on issues of poverty, unemployment, discrimination, and other forms of social injustice. Similarly, Clark (2007) noted that most students agreed that the traditional mission of social work emphasizes helping the poor and disadvantaged through direct services and advocacy in the form of political and social action. Therefore, poverty is one of the main interests in the field of social work, and future social workers are expected to show greater understanding for the poor. For this reason, it is important to identify how social work students perceive the causes of poverty.
To date, a lot of studies have been conducted to explore individual attitudes toward poverty and poor population. Schwartz and Robinson (1991), by using the Feagin Poverty Scale, investigated the perceptions of the causes of poverty of the three groups of social work students at a midsized urban university in the Midwest with a department of social work and found that all three groups attributed poverty mostly to the structural factor, and least to personal deficiency. Similarly, Rosenthal (1993) developed two scales (The Belief in Individual Cause of Poverty scale and The Antipathy to the Poor scale in measuring the attitudes of graduate social work students toward impoverished people. Rehner and colleagues (1997) used the Attitude toward Poverty developed by Atherton and his colleagues (1993) to study the Mississippi social workers’ attitude toward poverty and the poor.
Another study, conducted by Sun (2001), the Feagin’s Poverty scale was used to measure social work students’ ans non-social work students’ perceptions of the causes of poverty. In 2010, Yun & Weaver developed the 21-item Attitude toward Poverty Short Form scale that measures people’s attitudes toward poverty and poor people. This scale includes three factors which measure a range of diverse attitudes toward poverty and poor population such as the personal deficiency, the stigma and the structural perspective. Brief summaries of the previous studies on student perceptions of causes of poverty provide a context for the current study.
Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify what social work students (SW) and non-social work (NSW) students perceive as the causes of poverty. Understanding the perceived causes of poverty is important in addressing the issue of poverty. To the knowledge of the author, this paper is probably the first to measure the students’ attitudes toward poverty in Vietnam to date.