What People Want: Rethinking Poverty, Culture, and Educational Attainment

Abstract

New cultural approaches to the study of poverty treat “culture” as providing the means for action and neglect the classical concern with motives for action. The author argues that though this paradigm shift has led to many important and interesting discoveries, it has also created blind spots that prevent a more complete understanding of how culture shapes action. After arguing that values, attitudes, and other motive concepts have been unfairly excluded from the new cultural pantheon, the author uses the empirical example of educational continuation to show that poor and nonpoor youth differ in their educational aspirations and that these differences can predict school continuation six years later. The findings are interpreted with an eye toward synthesizing “old” and “new” approaches to the study of culture and socioeconomic disadvantage.