The Multiple Risks of Social Disadvantage


The Multiple Risks of Social Disadvantage:
The Clustering of Risk Factors for Children

This project will use newly available data to describe the lives of at-risk children over time. The analysis will emphasize multiple and overlapping disadvantages. The project will focus on how children fair in four different difficult family situations: poverty, welfare, single-mother households and parental joblessness. We will also examine how the clustering of disadvantage is spatially located and whether this spatial concentration has changed over time.

The principal objectives of this project will be to determine the number of children experiencing any or all of the four disadvantages of interest. We will assess whether multiple disadvantage is widespread among poor children or whether it is confined to a small proportion of this group. We will also determine the extent to which the racial imbalance prevails among children with disadvantage in multiple areas since research demonstrates that minorities are over represented among poor children.

We will determine the number of children who experience disadvantage at both the family and neighborhood levels. We will measure whether the proportion of children who are most disadvantaged varies across neighborhoods or whether the most disadvantaged of children are indeed concentrated in the poorest of neighborhoods.

The research proposed here will conduct a series of analyses based on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID).

This study may provide an especially useful baseline against which to assess the changes put in place by the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. The multiple risk approach will distinguish the children who are most vulnerable and can assess how the receipt of public assistance currently clustered with other indicators of diadvantage. The key question that we can track is how children at-risk change over time after welfare reform is implemented. Our analysis permit a way of gauging the state level differentials that emerge in children's living circumstances that may be linked to policy variations in the implementation of the Welfare Reform Bill passed in 1996.