The Impact of Precise Geographic Adjustments on the Supplemental Poverty Measure.

IF 1.5 3区社会学 Q1 DEMOGRAPHY

Population Research and Policy Review Pub Date : 2026-01-01 Epub Date: 2026-02-27 DOI:10.1007/s11113-026-09995-1

J Tom Mueller, Darcy L Sullivan, Matthew M Brooks, Regina S Baker

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

The official poverty measure of the United States remains unequipped to appropriately capture poverty across America. As a result, the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) has increasingly supplanted the official measure in policy analysis and statistics. A primary point of conflict among poverty-focused scholars regarding the SPM is its current geographic adjustment, which adjusts poverty thresholds at three spatial scales: identified metropolitan areas, unidentified metropolitan areas by state, and nonmetropolitan areas by state. Pooling all nonmetropolitan counties within each state into a single adjustment is believed to be responsible for the 'flip' in the rural-urban poverty differential between the official measure and the SPM. Using federally restricted data, we address this conflict and generate novel estimates of the SPM using county-specific, hybrid, and commuting-zone geographic adjustments. Our estimates illustrate the role of the current adjustment in our understanding of rural-urban poverty, while also demonstrating the utility of our preferred commuting-zone-level adjustment.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11113-026-09995-1.

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精确地理调整对补充贫困指标的影响。

美国官方的贫困衡量标准仍然无法恰当地反映全美的贫困状况。因此，在政策分析和统计中，补充贫困指标（SPM）越来越多地取代了官方指标。关注贫困的学者对SPM的一个主要冲突点是其当前的地理调整，即在三个空间尺度上调整贫困阈值：已确定的大都市地区、按州确定的大都市地区和按州确定的非大都市地区。据信，将每个州的所有非大都市县集中到一个调整中，是官方衡量标准与SPM之间城乡贫困差距“颠倒”的原因。使用联邦政府限制的数据，我们解决了这一冲突，并使用特定县、混合和通勤区地理调整产生了新的SPM估计。我们的估计说明了当前调整在我们对城乡贫困的理解中的作用，同时也证明了我们首选的通勤区水平调整的效用。补充资料：在线版本提供补充资料，网址为10.1007/s11113-026-09995-1。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Population Research and Policy Review DEMOGRAPHY-

CiteScore

3.40

自引率

4.20%

发文量

期刊介绍： Now accepted in JSTOR! Population Research and Policy Review has a twofold goal: it provides a convenient source for government officials and scholars in which they can learn about the policy implications of recent research relevant to the causes and consequences of changing population size and composition; and it provides a broad, interdisciplinary coverage of population research. Population Research and Policy Review seeks to publish quality material of interest to professionals working in the fields of population, and those fields which intersect and overlap with population studies. The publication includes demographic, economic, social, political and health research papers and related contributions which are based on either the direct scientific evaluation of particular policies or programs, or general contributions intended to advance knowledge that informs policy and program development.