A Sociodemographic Risk Index?

Kristin Moore, Child Trends
Sharon Vandivere, Child Trends
Zakia Redd, Child Trends

The poverty line is often criticized; but it is nevertheless widely used. It is used both to monitor the well-being of society and also as a category for the tabulation of other variables, for example, health conditions for people below the poverty line compared with above the poverty line. While the construction of the poverty line is the aspect that is most frequently critiqued, other aspects of the poverty line are problematic as well. From a demographic point of view, it is problematic that a measure used so regularly to monitor the well-being of the population is based solely on income. In fact, the measure is adjusted for family size. We suggest that an expanded measure be considered to supplement and in some cases replace the use of the poverty line: the sociodemographic risk index. In this paper, we use data from 70,000 households in the 1997 and 1999 National Survey of America’s Families to create an index based on economic, social and demographic variables. Specifically, we incorporate income, family size, parent education, family structure, and language spoken by the parent to create a new index. We compare this index as a measure of well-being among children with the traditional poverty line measure, considering the proportion of children found to be at risk and whether the characteristics of families differ across the two measures. In addition, we compare whether a set of child and family outcomes are related more strongly to the poverty line measure or to the expanded sociodemographic risk index. For example, we examine whether children’s school engagement, behavior problems, health, food sufficiency, symptoms of parental mental health, and whether children skip school or have been expelled related similarly to the poverty line and to sociodemographic risk. We conduct these analyses for the population as a whole and for critical sub-groups, such as race/ethnicity sub-groups.