Sociology 441: Stratification

Family income

Family income is one of the most widely reported statistics. We have long time series on trends in average family incomes, and on income inequality .

There are two big problems with family income as a stratification measure:

• Only people living with family relatives are included. People who live alone or with other non-relatives are omitted from these statistics. Since these "unrelated individuals" tend to have low incomes (e.g., the elderly, people in their 20s) and since the number of unrelated individuals has grown recently, data that ignore unrelated individuals distort what is happening to Americans.

  This problem can be avoided by looking at households rather than families, but we don't have as long time series on households.

• Families differ by size. An income of $25,000 means one thing to a married couple without children and something quite else for a family of six or more. Families have been getting smaller over time (since fertility has been declining). So even if average family incomes weren't increasing, the smaller family sizes in recent years mean that the average family can live better today on the same income than in the past.

  This problem has led to use of standard of living measures that adjust for family size. However, data for these measures are not as widely available as for family incomes.


 

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Last updated February 4, 2000

comments to: Reeve Vanneman. reeve@umd.edu