Defining income groups and family race

Defining income groups and family race

This analysis 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. 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.

It’s more complex to define what race or ethnicity a family should be categorized as, especially considering the growing share of multiracial and multiethnic households in the United States. In this brief, we categorize a family as white, African American, or Latino based on the race and ethnicity of the person identified by the Census as the “household head.” We recognize this is an approximation and ideally the categories would be more inclusive. Breaking the category down smaller, however, does not give us a large-enough sample size for our analysis.

Table 1 breaks down the distribution of racial and ethnic groups within each income group. Low-income families have a higher share of African American and Latino families, compared to middle-class or professional families.

Table 1