Age-Adjusted Poverty Rates at the National, State, and County Level

• In Event: 082 - Open Refereed Roundtable Session I
  In Refereed Roundtable: A. Table 18. Inequality

Abstract

The risk of poverty varies by age, and places differ in the age distribution of their population. Thus, comparisons of simple poverty rates between places may not reveal how the risk of poverty actually differs. Since poverty rates in the US are typically highest for children and lowest for the elderly, a place with an older age profile may appear to pose less risk of poverty than a place with a younger age profile even if the risk of poverty in every age category is actually higher in the first place than in the second.
Age-adjustment is a common demographic and epidemiological technique to facilitate comparisons across time or across geographic entities where the characteristic under study is known to differ by age and the age compositions of populations to be compared differ. Age-adjusted poverty rates can be computed by calculating each place’s age-specific poverty rates and then applying those age-specific rates to a common or standard population. Thus, a place’s age-adjusted rate is the rate that would have occurred for that place, given its age-specific poverty rates, if that place had the age distribution of the standard population.
Crude versus age-adjusted poverty rates will be compared at three geographic levels: annual US poverty rates from 1959 to the present and projected into the future, state poverty rates for 2009, and average poverty rates for Texas counties from 2007 through 2011.

Author

• Robert F. Szafran, Stephen F. Austin State University