In a study just published by the prestigious journal Demography, Anika Schenck-Fontaine (Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories) and Lidia Panico (Institut National d’Études Démographiques) looked at multiple economic hardship combinations and how they are associated with children’s behavior problems between ages 3 and 7. The study is based on longitudinal data from over 17,000 children followed by the Millennium Cohort Study (UK) and explores seven distinct experiences of economic hardship based on the possible combinations of income poverty, material deprivation, and subjective financial stress.
The authors argue that these three dimensions may overlap and occur together, but they are distinct and can be experienced independently of one another: While income poverty refers to low levels of financial resources available to a family, material deprivation captures the lived experience of economic hardship and refers to inadequate material conditions. In turn, subjective financial stress is the psychological dimension and refers to the subjective evaluation of economic circumstances. For example, a family may be low-income but neither financially stressed nor materially deprived.
Their results show that the different dimensions of economic hardship are indeed independently linked to child outcomes, and that all economic hardship combinations, including those without income poverty, are associated with higher levels of children’s behavior problems. The combination of material deprivation with subjective financial stress and the combination of all three dimensions of economic hardship were associated with the highest levels of behavior problems. The authors suggest that future research on the effects of economic hardship on children should consider the multidimensional nature of economic stressors for families, and not only income.