Poster #99 - Maternal Subjective Poverty Experience and Concurrent Maternal Depression in Early Postpartum Years

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Family Context & Processes

Integrative Statement

This study aims to examine poverty through people’s subjective experiences related to their life circumstances and how these appraisals relate to their psychological functioning, based on van Praag and Ferrer-i-Carbonell’s multidimensional approach to subjective poverty (2008) and Bowen family systems theory (Bowen, 1978). Poverty has consistently been reported to negatively affect caregivers’ psychological functioning (e.g. Kiernan & Mensah, 2009). However, literature has mostly defined poverty in terms of household income falling below a set threshold. This measure can be hard to accurately report for poor families because they often have complex family structures (multi-generational or have transient members) and high volatility in their incomes (van Praag & Ferrer-i-Carbonell, 2008). We argue that a subjective poverty index could more accurately reflect the multidimensional nature of poverty and predict caregiver’s psychological functioning. Based on theory and literature, three dimensions were chosen to create such a subjective poverty index, including caregiver’s feeling of role-overload (Coverman, 1989), availability of time (Merz & Rathjen, 2014), and economic strain (Marks, 2007). We hypothesized that maternal subjective poverty index will predict concurrent maternal depression above and beyond the effect of household income at 6, 15, and 24 months postpartum.
Participants were 1116 families (57% White, 43% African American) from the Family Life Project (FLP). 67.5% of families had an average income of less than 200% of the poverty threshold. 40% of mothers had 14 years of schooling or less. At 6, 15, and 24 months postpartum, a battery of assessments were administered to mothers at their homes, including the Brief Symptom Inventory 18 (Derogatis, 2000), the Role Overload Scale (Reilly, 1982), the Family Resource Scale (FRS; Dunst & Leet, 1987) assessing respondents’ perception of the adequacy of time for family and friends, and a measure assessing families economic strain (Conger & Elder, 1994).
Factor loadings of the three dimensions of subjective poverty were obtained from confirmatory factor analyses for each wave (see Figure 1 for an example) in R. A measurement equivalence test confirms adequate equivalence of the factor structure and factor loadings over time. Therefore, subjective poverty index (SPI) scores were computed for each mother based on the weighted scores of maternal role-overload, family time resources, and economic strain at each time point. SPIs were then used to predict concurrent maternal depression respectively at 6, 15 and 24 months controlling for household income, maternal education attainment, child race, sex and state of residence. Results show that SPI significantly and positively predicted maternal depression above and beyond the effect of income at each time point (see Table 1 for an example). The effect sizes (average Beta = .39) of SPIs on average are around three times bigger than the effect sizes of household income (average Beta= .1). Therefore, subjective poverty experience index is a better predictor of caregiver’s psychological functioning relative to household income as it might capture the nuanced living experiences among families. Future research could examine its convergent and predictive validity with parenting behaviors and child developmental outcomes.


Authors

• Guan Wang, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  Presenting Author

• Marta Benito-Gomez, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Non-Presenting Author

• W. Roger Mills-Koonce, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  Non-Presenting Author