Defining income groups and young families

Defining income groups and young families

The analysis in this issue brief follows the same methodology presented in “Finding Time.” For ease of composition, we use the term “family” throughout the brief, even though the analysis is done at the household level.

In this issue brief, we refer to what we call “young” families and compare their experiences to “working-age” families. A working-age family (the subject of an earlier issue brief) is one where at least one person in the household is between the ages of 16 and 64. Young families are a subset of these working-age families: Young families are those that have at least one person over the age of 16 and where everyone is under 35 years of age.

We split households in our sample into three income groups:

• Low-income households are those in the bottom third of the income distribution, earning less than $25,440 per year in 2015 dollars.
• Professional households are those in the top fifth of the income distribution who have at least one household member with a college degree or higher. These households have an income of $71,158 or higher in 2015 dollars.
• Everyone else falls in the middle-class category.

Table 1 breaks down the share of young families (a subset of these working-age families) across the three income groups in 2013. Young families are more likely than working-age families to be low-income.

Table 1