University of Maryland
Sociology 441: Stratification 

Exercise #3: comparing states: welfare and births to single mothers

The purpose of this exercise is to evaluate a common assertion about welfare payments to single mothers (i.e., Aid to Families with Dependent Children -- AFDC): that welfare encourages more births to single mothers. This idea has been part of the thinking behind the recent legislation to drastically reduce levels of welfare payments.

One of the ways that sociologists evaluate an idea like this is to use the variation across the 50 states to test whether states that are high on one aspect of the relationship (e.g., welfare) are also high on the other aspect of the relationship (e.g., births to single mothers). There are many problems with this too simple analysis (as you have learned or will learn in methods and statistics courses), but the simple comparison is always the start of the analysis.

Fortunately, the data are readily available in our favorite book, The Statistical Abstract of the United States. In 1990, average monthly AFDC payments ranged from a low of $115 in Alabama to a high of $651 in Alaska (Maryland's was $370). Do these differences have an effect on birth rates of single mothers? That is, where payments are higher, are single women more encouraged to have children?

Other tables can help us test this argument. We would like to have statewise data on births to mothers receiving AFDC but this is not available. What we do have are the percent of all births that are births to unmarried women (this is sometimes called the illegitimacy ratio). This should be close enough.

Your job is to test the idea that states that are high on average AFDC payments are high on births to unmarried mothers. There are several ways we might do this; computers would help and those of you with statistics and methods training might want to try to calculate a correlation coefficient. But for those of us with just calculators and no statistics training, simple methods are fine. Sort the states into those with high AFDC payments and those with low payments, (or high, medium, and low) and for each group of states, calculate the average illegitimacy ratios. This is a bit of clerical work but nobody said science was easy.

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