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Title: Poverty and Child Well-Being in Canada and the United States: Does it Matter How We Measure Poverty?
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Phipps, Shelley Curtis, Lori |
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Poverty and Child Well-Being in Canada and the United States: Does it Matter How We Measure Poverty? Working Paper, Human Resources Development Canada, September 2000. Also: http://www11.sdc.gc.ca/en/cs/sp/arb/publications/research/2000-001273/page01.shtml Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79 Publisher: Canadian International Labor Network (CILN) Keyword(s): Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Behavioral Problems; Body Mass Index (BMI); Canada, Canadian; Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY); Child Health; Children, Poverty; Children, Well-Being; Cross-national Analysis; Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT); Poverty; Schooling; Weight Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. In this paper we examine the robustness of conclusions about the association between poverty and children's well-being to alternative choices about how we measure poverty. In particular, we focus upon the influence of data set chosen, sample selected and poverty line used. Throughout, the analysis is conducted for children in both Canada and the US, both to emphasize that the issues are not unique to the Canadian situation and to point out the influence of these measurement choices upon our understanding of Canada/US comparisons of children's poverty and/or well-being. We find that estimates of the incidence of child poverty are very sensitive to measurement choices. For example, we can come to conclusions as diverse as: 1) the incidence of child poverty is 10 percentage points higher in the US than in Canada; 2) there is no difference in the incidence of child poverty in the two countries. Reassuringly, however, these quite differences in estimates of the level of child poverty do not carry over so dramatically to estimates of the association between child poverty and child outcomes. In almost all cases, child poverty, regardless of how it is measured, is associated with worse outcomes for children (we consider body mass index, Peabody Picture Vocabulary scores, trouble concentrating and hyperactivity); these associations are stronger in the United States than in Canada. While estimated magnitudes of these associations are not the same across alternative measures of poverty, we argue that they are not generally significantly different in either a statistical or economic sense. The exception to this conclusion is that if poverty is measured using official US poverty lines, there is sometimes no relationship apparent between children's outcomes and poverty. |
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Bibliography Citation
Phipps, Shelley and Lori Curtis. "Poverty and Child Well-Being in Canada and the United States: Does it Matter How We Measure Poverty?" Working Paper, Human Resources Development Canada, September 2000. |