The Effects of Adult and Childhood Poverty on Individual Psychological Characteristics: The Case of Russia

The effects of growing up in poverty are destructive in many areas of life and can have prolonged effects on the well-being, development and health of children and adults. Thus poverty has been associated with a wide range of characteristics such as addiction, cognitive capacity, health behaviors, life satisfaction, self-control and etc. (Haushofer & Fehr, 2014; Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013). Past studies defined and measured poverty differently and focused on only one or two dimensions of poverty. Therefore, the extent to which different dimensions of poverty are predictive of individual psychological characteristics is still unknown. In this paper, we present a study which combining the mentioned approaches to studying poverty on psychological level and determining and effects adult and childhood poverty on the variety of individual psychological characteristics between samples of Russian poor citizens (N=162) of Moscow with non-poor citizens (N=188).Measures. Socioeconomic status in childhood was measured using three items constructed by Griskevicius et al. (Griskevicius et al., 2013). Individual psychological characteristics was measured using different scales. The results revealed significant effects of adult poverty on values and greed. The results revealed the significant effect of adult and childhood poverty for trust and life satisfaction The analysis revealed that adult status had a significant impact on trust only in the groups of those who did not experience poverty in childhood, i.e. the group with average levels of wealth in childhood, and the wealthy group.In conclusion, our study revealed the impact of childhood and adult poverty on various individual psychological characteristics.