The Complexity of Deprivation: Identifying Data-Driven Groups and Longitudinal Patterns of Material Hardship Experience

Background and Purpose

In the past 30 years, material hardship has emerged as a direct measure of deprivation in the United States (Beverly, 2001; Heflin, Sandberg, & Rafail, 2009). Material hardship measures a family’s actual experiences of being unable to pay for certain basic needs, such as food, housing, medical care, utilities, and essential bills. This is in contrast to longstanding practices in both policymaking and research, which tend to favor income poverty as a proximate (but still indirect) measure of deprivation. The relatively weak correlation between material hardship and income poverty is valuable evidence that income poverty does not universally predict experiences of deprivation (Mayer & Jencks, 1989; Short, 2005). Understanding material hardship is thus an important complement to income poverty and may provide different evidence about both the ways in which deprivation can affect families and possible policy responses to deprivation. The current study begins to fill critical gaps in our conceptualization of deprivation by examining complex material hardship experiences concurrently and over time.

Methods

The study uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study (Fragile Families), which is a birth cohort study, representative of non-marital births in large US cities in 1998. Fragile Families is the sole, large-scale, national areas dataset with longitudinal and comprehensive information on material hardship. Following prior work (Heflin et al., 2009), this study uses measures of five discrete material hardships, namely food, housing, medical, utility, and essential bill-paying hardships. Restricting the sample to families with complete material hardship data (n=2,839), the present study employs latent class analysis (LCA) to identify material hardship groups defined by different relative frequencies of each hardship type. Families’ likelihood of moving between these groups over time is assessed using latent transition analysis (LTA) to identify common patterns of longitudinal material hardship experience.

Results

Results are the first to identify data-driven groups of material hardship and longitudinal patterns of material hardship experience. Three material hardship groups emerged: limited material hardship is characterized by low probability of bill-paying hardship and very low probability of all other hardships; moderate material hardship is characterized by high probability of bill-paying hardship, moderate probability of utility hardship, and lower probability of housing, food, and medical hardships; and severe material hardship is characterized by very high probability of bill-paying and utility hardships, high probability of food hardship, and moderate probability of housing and medical hardships. Patterns describing families’ movement between these three material hardship groups over time fall into six identifiable groups, namely: mostly limited; mostly moderate; mostly severe; improves; worsens; and inconsistent. These longitudinal patterns differentiate families’ experiences of stability or movement and relative severity of material hardship experience over time.

Conclusions

These novel empirical results are the first to identify data-drive groups describing concurrent material hardship experiences and further to examine longitudinal patterns of material hardship experience. These findings improve our understanding of deprivation and move us towards understanding the impact of different experiences of material hardship and identifying policy approaches to prevent such experiences or mitigate negative impacts.