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Childhood Chronic Poverty Estimations:Looking beyond a count index

Name: Childhood Chronic Poverty Estimations:Looking beyond a count index
Published: 2020-07-27
License: This work is licensed under an Other license created by the PSID, namely that you agree not to redistribute data or other materials without the written agreement of ICPSR, unless: 1. You serve as the OFFICIAL or DESIGNATED REPRESENTATIVE at an ICPSR MEMBER INSTITUTION and are assisting AUTHORIZED USERS with obtaining data, or 2. You are collaborating with other AUTHORIZED USERS to analyze the data for research or instructional purposes.

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Henrietta A. Asiamah, University of Guelph

Version: View help for Version V1

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
CHRONIC-POVERTY			07/27/2020 02:50:PM

Project Citation:

Asiamah, Henrietta A. Childhood Chronic Poverty Estimations:Looking beyond a count index. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2020-07-27. https://doi.org/10.3886/E120427V1

Project Description

Summary: Previous works have estimated the level of chronic poverty suffered by children using a count index, that is, the number of times a child was observed to be poor over a specified period of time. In addressing the question of which child suffers greater chronic poverty, this study looks beyond a count-based approach by paying attention to poverty measurement approaches that account for the timing, spacing and severity of poverty spells. This study is the first to document the poverty experiences of children in a developed nation using these intertemporal lifetime poverty measures. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics longitudinal dataset of the United States, I demonstrate that the count index does not account for all aspects of chronic poverty. Specifically, the evidence suggests that spending fewer periods in poverty is not always an indication of less chronic poverty suffered if the depth and distribution of poverty are ignored. I compare chronic poverty experiences between groups of children based on race, age of mother at birth, region, type of household, parental educational attainment and experiences of parental marital dissolution. Not surprisingly, non-whites suffer more chronic poverty than whites. This study shows that this difference is significantly increased when the timing and spacing of poverty spells are accounted for.

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: Chronic poverty; poverty spells; Early childhood; PSID

Geographic Coverage: United States

Time Period(s): 1968 – 1997

Universe: Children born in each year (that is aged 1) in each survey year between 1968 and 1988 followed for 10 years

Data Type(s): survey data

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Published Versions

V2 [2020-07-27]

V1 [2020-07-27]

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