IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/dem/demres/v52y2025i20.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Household living arrangements and disparities in hardship

Author

Listed:
  • John Iceland

    (Pennsylvania State University)

  • Jaehoon Cho

    (Pennsylvania State University)

Abstract

Background: Experiences of hardship, such as trouble paying bills and food insecurity, vary considerably across different household living arrangements, with relatively low levels among married-couple households. Objective: We examine the extent to which disparities across household types can be explained by differences in income, non-income resources such as wealth, demographic characteristics, and socioeconomic characteristics such as education. Methods: We used 2021 data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and OLS regression and decomposition analysis to examine this issue. Results: We confirmed that married-couple households experienced fewer hardships than other household types; single-parent families with children experienced the most hardships. Other household types, such as cohabiting couples and people living alone, fell in between. Among the factors associated with the differences, non-income resources – particularly wealth – played the most significant role, followed by income and then demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that income and especially the wealth-building capacity of different types of households are the most important factors explaining household hardship disparities. Meanwhile, selection into different household types by demographic and socioeconomic characteristics is moderately important. Contribution: This study provides new information on why we observe differences in hardship across different types of households, including the important role played by wealth.

Suggested Citation

  • John Iceland & Jaehoon Cho, 2025. "Household living arrangements and disparities in hardship," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 52(20), pages 589-634.
  • Handle: RePEc:dem:demres:v:52:y:2025:i:20
    DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2025.52.20
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol52/20/52-20.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.4054/DemRes.2025.52.20?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    poverty; household living arrangements; wealth; income; hardship; sociodemographic characteristics; household types;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J1 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics
    • Z0 - Other Special Topics - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:dem:demres:v:52:y:2025:i:20. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Editorial Office (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.demogr.mpg.de/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.