Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

In the last thirty years, the economy in the US underwent a boom that burst in 2008 after the housing market crash resulting in a state of recession ever since (Amadeo 2018). Across the world, due to an increasingly interdependent global economy, Spain’s economy was impacted in the form of astronomical debt, skyrocketing taxes, and freezes on salaries for government employees and pensioners (Hill 2013). As thirty years prior, while there are several differences in the economic systems and experiences in each country, with globalization and the concept of an interdependent global economy being the focus of recent professional literature (Diaconu et all., 2018), both the US and Spain have experienced record unemployment rates, increasing poverty levels, and need for social services in the last ten years. The current exploratory study aims to measure the perspectives on poverty attribution of both American and Spanish graduate social work students enrolled in two universities, one in the United States, and one in Spain respectively. Results show that social work students enrolled in both programs tend to disagree that poverty is rooted in individual causes, instead attributing it to social causes. The study compares students’ perceptions of the two main reasons for the existence of poverty. Because poverty is an international issue, more collaborations between school of social work are needed for a more complex view of poverty attributions from a historical perspective. Possible solutions should be taught from a worldwide perspective.