Perceived Inequality In Everyday Life-Garcia-Castro

This note last modified November 19, 2024

#notesFromPaper Year : Tags : Authors: Garcia-Castro Gonzalez Frigolett Jimenez-Moya Rodriguez-Bailon Willis

Has a few simple questions that measure inequality

Perceived Economic Inequality in everyday life. Adapted from (García-Castro et al., 2019), a single item measures this variable. We asked participants to report the frequency of perceived economic inequality in their everyday life by answering the following question (from 1 = never, to 5 = very frequently): “How often do you see situations of economic inequality in your daily life?” PEIEL’s measures in recent studies have shown satisfactory validity evidences (see Melita et al., 2021; Sánchez-Rodríguez et al., 2020).

Intolerance of inequality This study considered a single item commonly used in international surveys (e.g., ISSP Research Group, 2017). Participants were questioned about their level of agreement or disagreement (1 = totally agree, 5 = totally disagree) with the following question: “In Chile, income differences are too large.” This measure was conceptualized as tolerance of inequality (Gonthier, 2017; Larsen, 2016; Schröder, 2017). Considering higher scores of this measure have been shown to mean lower tolerance for inequality, we designate said measure as intolerance of inequality.

Attitudes toward redistribution Two items adapted from Dawtry et al. (2015) were used to measure support for redistributive policies. Participants were questioned about their level of agreement or disagreement (1 = totally agree, 5 = totally disagree) with the following statements: “I think the government should redistribute wealth charging higher taxes to rich people.” and “Wealth in this country should be distributed more equitably, also reaching groups with fewer resources.” The results from these two items were then averaged to produce one score at each given time (r ranging from .53 to .61).