José Juan Vázquez:

We have reached a decision regarding your submission to Revista Interamericana de Psicologia/Interamerican Journal of Psychology, "Causal attributions of poverty in less developed countries: Comparing among undergraduates from nations with different development levels".

Our decision is to:

Dr. Edil Torres Rivera
Universidad del Valle, Guatemala
etorresrivera@gmail.com
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Reviewer A:

Para el autor: hay unas correcciones realizadas en el resumen en español.

Se sugiere precisar que el estudio se realizó en Cuatro paises en desarrollo y  no como indica en el texto: en los paises menos desarrollados.


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Reviewer B:

This is the evaluation of the manuscript: “Causal attributions of poverty in less developed countries: Comparing among undergraduates from nations with different development levels” (109-365-1-RV).

 

This study analyze the causal attributions of poverty in a sample of undergraduates from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile and Spain. For that, three components for the causal attributions for poverty were considered: “Fault of the world economic structure”, “Fault of fate, nature, cultural habits, and political misconduct” and “Fault of the developing countries' population”. Additionally, participants country of origin, perceived social class, economic situation, political idology and religious beliefs were also considered.

According to the results, the causal attributions of poverty in developing countries are mainly influenced by the level of development in the country of origin of interviewees, their political ideology and their economic situation.

 

The proposal of this work is considered of value, given the potential contribution of the results to the design of future policies, as well as it provides a novel approach in the analysis of the data aimed to study causes of poverty. However, there are some aspects that hinder the understanding of the work and limit the contribution of it in the current format.

Next, some comments and recommendations are listed, as well as the manuscript with comments is upload with specific suggestions or questions to the authors:

 

Introduction:

This work is based on a systematic examination of the relevant literatura and the current knowledge  related to the topic is included.

 

Method:

This section requires to make some specifications or clarifications (see details in the document with comments) concerning:

 

1) the sample distributions between countries (there are huge differences in the samples between some countries), and the analisys of differences between countries in their characteristics (included in Table 1 for all the countries together);

 

2) the instrument used (which includes some imtems from another questionnaire and other items nos specified), some details about its administration as well as for the scoring;

 

3) the criteria for the PCA and the cluster (to allow replications), and the implementation or not of other analysis (e.g. ANOVAS) to compare different aspects between countries.

 

Conclusions:

The potential implications of this study would be interesting to be included in this section (e.g. how this results could provide evidence for different policies in less developed countries), as well as recommendations for future studies with the same aimed.

 

Format and minor points:

Citations: check in the manuscript  the order of authors included in every citation (APA style, alfabetic order); and unify the format for the “et al.”

 

In sum, I consider that this work presents an important issue for the area, and that merits the effort to be revised and resubmitted for publication.

 

I expect that this evaluation will contribute to improving the quality of the work.

 

Best regards,


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Edil Torres Rivera, Ph.D., Editor
Interamerican Journal of Psychology
http://journal.sipsych.org/index.php/IJP