Abstract
Racial and ethnic inequality continues to be the subject of considerable public interest. We shed light on this issue by examining racial disparities in the prevalence of several types of hardship, such as trouble paying bills and housing problems, in the USA over the 1992–2019 period. Using data from several panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, we find that hardships were considerably higher—sometimes double, depending on the measure—among blacks and Hispanics than whites and Asians. Nevertheless, these disparities generally narrowed over time. We find that the decline in these disparities—as indicated by a summary hardship index—exceeded that of the official income poverty ratio. We also find that while Asians were more likely to be poor than whites, they were not more likely to experience hardship. Notably, we also see variation in the experiences of different types of hardship. Specifically, there was little decline in the racial disparity of two of the hardships that tend to be responsive to short-term fluctuations in income—bill-paying and health hardship, as well as fear of crime—but substantial declines in disparities with most other measures. Overall, our findings indicate significant racial differences in the experience of hardship, though with a narrowing of many gaps over time.
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The Census Bureau imputes missing data for core variables and there was no missing data from 2005 onwards. There were some variables from the topic modules in the 1992–2001 panels with missing data that were not imputed by the Census Bureau, including the hardship measures themselves to varying degrees in 1992 and the nativity variable in 1992 to 2001. We omitted observations with missing data on these variables, which reduced the overall sample pooled across years from 214,277 to 207,667 when using the hardship index as the dependent variable which requires no missing data on any of the constituent hardship indicators. In addition, there were missing values for our poverty variable in 1992–2010 in cases where income data were not available for all months in the previous year, and those observations were also omitted from the poverty-specific regressions, but not from the models with our main hardship dependent variables. In models where poverty is the dependent variable, we have a sample size of 198,641. The sample sizes in each of the regression models are listed in Tables 4 and 5.
We also examined if our results vary if we omit households where householders have partners of a different race than their own. Our conclusions remain the same with this omission. This is in part due to the fact that only about 4.6 percent of households had a householder and partner of different races/ethnicities over the 1992–2019 period, rising from 2.7 percent in 1992 to 6.4 percent in 2019.
Our results are very similar whether we include a control for nativity versus models that include only native-born respondents.
Testing the statistical significance of the differences in the interaction terms in the poverty and hardship models is not straightforward since the poverty and hardship variables have different ranges and are estimated via logistic regression vs. OLS. In addition to the substantive comparisons in the text, to conduct a formal test of significance we used a continuous version of the poverty variable—the income to poverty threshold ratio. We then standardized both the hardship and poverty indicators, with a mean of zero and standard deviation of 1 so they have more similar ranges. We then re-ran OLS regressions for both outcome variables and conducted t-tests for differences in the race*year interaction coefficients yielded by these models. Confirming our substantive conclusion in the text, we found that the black*2019 and Hispanic*2019 interaction terms were larger in the hardship models than poverty models, indicating larger declines in black-white and Hispanic-white hardship gaps than analogous poverty gaps, in both models with and without controls, and all significant at the 0.01 level.
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This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, Population Research Institute Center Grant P2CHD041025.
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Iceland, J., Sakamoto, A. The Prevalence of Hardship by Race and Ethnicity in the USA, 1992–2019. Popul Res Policy Rev 41, 2001–2036 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-022-09733-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-022-09733-3
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