Introduction:

Poverty represents for those who live it, an abuse of their fundamental rights in a socio-structurally violent context that hinders access to opportunities for a better quality of life. In this framework of social exclusion, processes of anomie are also brewing, which, in relation to poverty, are believed to have effects on people's psychological well-being.

Method:

The research was developed with a sample of 2000 people (89.5% women and 10.5% men) between 15 and 88 years old, from the state of Guanajuato, with non-experimental, cross-sectional, descriptive, comparative and correlational design. In order to determine whether poverty had effects on psychological well-being and anomie, as well as the existence of effects on psychological well-being, due to anomie, a relative poverty index was designed to obtain groups between which the means were comparated and Cohen's d to know the magnitude of the effect. Subsequently, Pearson correlations were performed to find out if there were relationships between well-being, anomie and poverty.

Results:

The findings showed significant low effects of poverty in the dimensions of psychological well-being, specifically in self-acceptance and purpose in life, as well as in the dimensions of anomie. It was found that there are no important relationships between poverty, well-being and anomie, however, the shared variance between these variables changes in groups with a greater or lesser presence of the anomie dimensions.

Discussion or Conclusion:

The contrasting effects found in the psychological well-being factors and the low relationships found among the three variables studied are analyzed, based on the adaptive processes of those who live in poverty. According to the results, it’s necessary to consider the background socio-structural violence in the emergence of anomic behaviors, as well as the accentuation of them in certain groups, for the emergence of behaviors related to social problems arises.

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