UNIT 14. Poverty: The effects of Race-ethnicity, family structure, and age.

In previous work, we found out some of the categories of people that are most likely to be poor -- and which categories make up "most of the poor people." We have also seen the striking decline of the "the nuclear family" among households over the past few decades. This time we are going to see what race-ethnicity and family structure have to do with poverty.

Open datafile HHPOV9.DAT, from the 1990 Census. Start log, do Info and All Marginals, as usual.

We are dealing here with a (huge) sample, not of individuals, but of households. It is the whole household that is living in poverty or not, since the Poverty statistic includes income from all sources and all household members, divided by the number of people in the family.

The Age numbers are the age of the "head of household." As you can see, it includes some very young "heads."

Variable HHTYPE is the type of household:

MRRdCpl

married couple, including cohabitors who may not be legally married.

MaleFam A man alone, with children.

FemlFam A woman alone, with children. The famous "female headed household."

MaleNonF

A man alone, without children.

FemlNonF

A woman alone, without children.

First we need the basic bivariates (def: a table of just independent / dependent variables).

So Crosstab and slope graph (by hand, by computer, or by CHIP, with Plot , then Slope.

RACELAT / POVRTY for Fig. 14.1, and put the proper title on it.

AGEii / POVRTY for Fig. 14.2, ditto.

HHTYPE / POVRTY for Fig. 14.3

RACELAT / HHTYPE, for Fig. 14.4.

Q1. Which kinds of Family structures have the lowest and highest poverty rates?

Q2. How do the race-ethnicities compare in poverty rates?

Q3. How does poverty vary depending on the age of the head ofhousehold?

Q4. From the poverty standpoint, which race-ethnicity is most likelyto have the "worst" family structure.

Crosstab RACELAT / AGE and do pct across, and also pct down. This is too messy to graph, but look at it and see if you can find out:

Q5. Which race-ethnicity, if any, is age-disadvantaged in terms of poverty? (Hint: is more likely to be in age groups that are poorer?)

Then, to see what the Fishnets can tell us:

Fig. 14.5, Percent poor by Race-ethnicity and age. For graphs by CHIP,crosstab RACELAT / POVRTY Control AGEii. For other graphing, AGE /POVRTY Control RACELAT probably works best to give you the subtables easiest to use. Either way, of course, gives the same percentages, just arranged a bit differently.

Fig. 14.6, Percent poor by Race-ethnicity and Family type. Crosstab RACELAT / POVRTY, control HHTYPE for CHIP-made graphs, otherwise HHTYPE / POVRTY control RACELAT.

Fig. 14.7, Percent poor by Household type and Age. Crosstab HHTYPE / POVRTY control AGEii for CHIP graphs, otherwise AGE / POVRTY control HHTYPE.

For the grand finale, Crosstab RACELAT / POVRTY and control AGEii and HHTYPE, percent across. Make a slope graph with just two points: The combination with the highest percent poor, and the combination with the lowest percent poor, and label each point by the categories it comprises. For example, the highest poverty point might be labeled (I am making this up) Asian, 65+, MaleFam, poverty pct 66, and then a steep slope down to (I am making this up too) the least poor, at 5 pct, the combination MaleNonF, 25-34, Latino.

Q5. And what are the poverty differences depending on the age of the household head and the family type?

Q6. How does the relationship of Race-ethnicity to poverty change as we go along the age scale?

Q7. How do age and race-ethnicity affect poverty?

Q8. From the poverty viewpoint, what is the worst combination of race-ethnicity, age, and family structure? The best?