Poor people in poor places: local opportunity structures and household poverty
Cotter, D.A.
Rural Sociology 67(4): 534-555
2002
ISSN/ISBN: 0036-0112 DOI: 10.1111/j.1549-0831.2002.tb00118.xDocument Number: 384438
Accounts of poverty generally fall into either "individualist" or "structuralist" camps. Often these are seen as irreconcilable and incompatible competing perspectives. This paper integrates individualist and structuralist accounts of poverty by examining the relationship between "person poverty" and "place poverty" in nonmetropolitan and metropolitan labour markets in the USA, using a multilevel framework. I fashion a general model of poverty production and allocation, drawing on the labour market ecology perspective. After a discussion of this perspective, I develop a multilevel framework for analysing data from the 1990 Census Public Use Microdata Labour Market Area Files sample, STF-3c, involving 421 324 households, and other sources to show how compositional and contextual factors affect households' likelihoods of being in poverty. These multilevel models also allow us to estimate the degree to which labour market conditions influence the magnitude of household labour supply characteristics. Results suggest that both compositional and contextual factors contribute to the metropolitan-nonmetropolitan difference in poverty rates, and that the effects of employment vary in accordance with labour market characteristics.