It's Monday! YOU Do the Math!

Recently I have been skimming through my textbooks from my last couple years of graduate school training. The purpose behind this madness is to find reference materials for my final paper I must write to graduate from my program. It was during this adventure that I came across some interesting statistics that I wanted to share…

The poverty threshold is a concept used by the U.S. Census Bureau “to determine who is poor. Poverty thresholds vary by family size and are updated annually for inflation using the Consumer Price Index”…For example, in 2000 the poverty threshold was $17,463 for a family of four…The Joint Center for Poverty Research reported the following information related to poverty in the United States in 2001…

11.7 percent or 32.9 million people in the United States were poor

16.3 percent of all children under the age of 18 lived below the poverty level. This is the highest poverty level for any group.

26.4 percent of all households headed by women in the United States were poor

10.1 percent of elderly persons (65+) were poor

21.4 percent of persons of Hispanic origin were poor

22.5 percent of African Americans were poor

9.9 percent of whites were poor

39 percent of adults with disabilities have household incomes of $15,000 or less compared to 10 percent of other households

[Schriver, J. (2004) Human behavior and the social environment: Shifting paradigms in essential knowledge for social work practice, 4th Ed. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc. p. 224]

I also found a chart with the following statistics that I thought were interesting as well, so I wanted to share them…

Death Rates Among People Ages 25 to 34 by Race/Ethnicity in the year 2000

Accidents:
Non-Hispanic blacks 3,500,000
Hispanics 3,400,000
Non-Hispanic whites 3,100,000

Suicide:
Non-Hispanic whites 1,500,000
Non-Hispanic blacks 1,000,000
Hispanics 800,000

Homicide:
Non-Hispanic blacks 4,400,000
Hispanics 1,500,000
Non-Hispanic whites 400,000

HIV infection:
Non-Hispanic blacks 2,900,000
Hispanics 700,000
Non-Hispanic whites 300,000

[Schriver, J. (2004) Human behavior and the social environment: Shifting paradigms in essential knowledge for social work practice, 4th Ed. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc. p. 236]