Journal article

Community Attitudes Toward People Receiving Unemployment Benefits: Does Volunteering Change Perceptions?

Timothy P Schofield, Peter Butterworth

BASIC AND APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY | ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD | Published : 2018

Abstract

People receiving government income support due to unemployment are sometimes required to participate in activities such as volunteering. These “mutual obligation” requirements have community support, but the effect of volunteering on benefit recipients is unclear. In three person-perception experiments (N = 222, 533, 934), we considered whether volunteering overcomes negative evaluations of unemployed benefit recipients. Volunteering increased the extent to which benefit recipients were considered suitable workers and likeable, but these effects also generalized to non-recipients. Results suggest that volunteering may compensate for attitudinal barriers arising from welfare stigma that repre..

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Grants

Awarded by Australian Research Council (ARC)


Awarded by ARC Future Fellowship


Funding Acknowledgements

This paper was funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) grant #DP160104178 awarded to PB, and PB is funded by an ARC Future Fellowship #FT13101444 and also a "University of Melbourne Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences Research Fellowship".