Discipline: Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences
Subcategory: Social Sciences/Psychology/Economics
Md Soriful Islam - Savannah State University
Co-Author(s): Dr. Deden Rukmana
Poverty is a universal human situation of being unable to get or afford a standard level of food, water and shelter (America’s Debt Help Organization). According to World Health Organization (WHO), poverty is often defined in absolute terms of low income – less than US$2 a day. So, poverty exits all over the world but in different degrees. The United States is one of the richest country in the world but still many of its residents are living in poverty level. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2015, the official poverty rate is 13.5 percent. An estimated of 43.1 million Americans lived in poverty according to the official measure. Many reasons are responsible for increasing poverty in USA. Some of the causes are poor economy, lack of affordable housing, lack of education, medical expenses, lack of markets, poor infrastructure, poor leadership, bad governance, under-employment and lack of skills, capital and others. A lot of study accomplished for finding out the reasons of poverty and the relationship of different variables with poverty. According to some researches, poverty is strongly correlated with race and ethnicity (Hilary W. Hoynes, 2006 and Glenn C. Loury, 2000). In addition, they also stated that education is also a strong predictor of poverty status. In the article of Hilary W. Hoynes, she took less than a high school education category for identifying the relationship of education with poverty. Another research shown strong correlation with poverty and gender (Eldin Fahmy, 2014). Fahmy described the relationship between gender with poverty and changes between 1999 and 2012. Mainly, the author tried to focus on the circumstances of women. Here, author showed a subtle picture of the gender analysis of poverty. Savannah is one of the most beautiful and historical city in USA. From 1733 to today, those 234-year histories, Savannah has seen many good and bad times in its different sectors. In the last few decades, Savannah has achieved significant economic growth, social welfare, reducing inequalities in different sectors and creating vast amount of job opportunities for its inhabitants. Nevertheless, economic improvement is not equal among all of its regions. Still some of its regions are struggling for reducing the rate of poverty. Chatham County is one of the county of Savannah, which is struggling for solving poverty problem. Race, gender, low wage levels, income inequality, and low educational attainment are key issues for poverty in this county. If the incongruity is not reduced in Chatham County, poverty will affect economic growth negatively in the future. For that reason, this study will try to find out the relationship among gender, race, and educational attainment in relation to poverty from year 2010 to 2016 for Chatham County. Research question for this article is that which regions are lagged behind in respect of higher poverty rate with relation to age, gender, race and education? For this study, all of the variables data have been collected from the secondary source. Variables like (gender, race, and educational attainment) have been collected from American Community Survey (ACS) year 2010 to 2016. Software like GIS has been used here for analyzing the data. In addition, the study has been applied some statistical tools like SPSS for identifying the association between poverty and above all variables. Relationship between the variables (poverty, gender, race, and educational attainment) have been compared using a one-way ANOVA method. In addition, Chi-square test has been used here for measuring how well observed data fits with the expected distributed data for the above variables. Also, linear models and logistic regression have been used to calculate adjusted mean scores for each lower functional measures as a function of the poverty and poverty related issues. For finding out the relationship between two variables, pairwise method has been used here by accepting null hypothesis where the ANOVA’s are significant. This study implies that black people are poorer than other race of people. In addition, women are living in below of the poverty level than the men. Furthermore, people who have not high school education, they are poorer than the other people. This study will be valuable for the policy makers for identifying regions those are still struggling for reducing poverty in respect of above all variables. Furthermore, this study will be very useful for developing Chatham County as an economically prosperous and functionally efficient with other cities in USA.
ERN CONFERENCE.docxFunder Acknowledgement(s): Savannah State University
Faculty Advisor: Dr Deden Rukmana, rukmanad@savannahstate.edu
Role: I did research portion of this research. I collected data from different sources and analysis data by using different software.