Income (anchored Supplmental Poverty Measure) poverty by family type, 1980–2023
Income Poverty rates are an anchored version of the census’s Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), based
on data from IPUMS CPS (Flood et al. 2024) and Wimer et al. (2024). Family types are determined by the presence of children and the marital status and age of the head of the SPM resource unit (which is technically a broader unit than a family since
it includes unmarried or unrelated cohabiting adults and their children). The “married head” category includes
heads with either present or absent spouses, and the “unmarried head” category includes both unpartnered and
cohabiting heads. If the head is 65 or over, then the unit is included in the “head 65 or over” category regardless
of marital status or presence of children.