Anxiety about the economy and prejudice towards unsheltered people in the United States

The stereotypes and stigma associated with unsheltered people negatively impact their access to support (Omerov et al., Health & Social Care in the Community 28:1–11, 2020), yet there is very minimal research on prejudice towards the unsheltered. Given the state of the economy at the time this research was conducted and the lack of updated research on the topic, the present study had two aims: (1) to develop a revised measure of prejudice towards unsheltered people, and (2) to explore the link between economic anxiety and prejudice towards unsheltered people through the lens of terror-management theory (Greenberg et al., The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory. Springer, 1986). Because of this, we hypothesized that greater anxiety about the state of the economy is correlated with greater prejudice towards the unsheltered, and that conservative fiscal beliefs are correlated with more negative attitudes towards the unsheltered. The results support the hypotheses, with more conservative fiscal politics being a significant predictor of this prejudice, as measured by our newly developed updated scale with stronger psychometric properties than the existing measure of this prejudice. Future research in this area should focus on reducing prejudice towards the unsheltered in an effort to increase much-needed economic aid and social support for this social group.