Exploring the multifaceted structure of sense of deprivation

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel Drawing from both social justice and deprivation research, we conceptualize expressions of sense of deprivation (equated with sense of injustice) as a three-faceted structure defined by mode of experience, social reward, and social sphere of allocation. To empirically verify the fit between this conceptual structure and the actual configuration of people's deprivation reactions, we use a research model of two modes of experience (cognition and emotion), three classes of rewards (instrumental, relational and symbolic), and two social spheres of allocation (school and society at large). A Similarity Space Analysis (SSA) of 17 measures (that represents this model with data collected among Israeli adolescents) reproduced the three-dimensional structure of sense of deprivation, although not all hypothesized affinities and distances between measures were empirically reconstructed.