1. Objectifs

Intentions :
«The aim of this article is to describe exposure to poverty of participants in a Quebec birth cohort during the first 10 years of life according to different measures of poverty. We also explore family characteristics associated with different trajectories of poverty.» (p. 271)

2. Méthode

Échantillon/Matériau :
Of the sample «[o]f the 2,120 families who provided consent in 1998, 1,334 (63%) participated in the tenth survey in 2008 when children were aged 10-11 years.» (p. 272) The data are from «[t]he Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development (QLSCD) [which] is a birth cohort of a representative sample of Quebec singleton live births in the period 1997-1998.» (p. 271)

Instruments :
Questionnaire

Type de traitement des données :
Analyse statistique

3. Résumé

According to the authors, «[…] almost one quarter (24.4%) of five-month-old participating children were living in families with low income and 11.5% of families received SW [social welfare] payments at that time. The prevalence of poverty during childhood, whether measured by low income or by receipt of SW, decreased over time and, among our participants at 10 years, 14.6% lived in a low-income family and 2.7% were on social welfare. However, the two curves are not parallel and at the ages of 5 and 8 years, there was a reduction of families on SW while the number of families with a low income was larger. […] Children more likely to be exposed to low income […] were those with non-European immigrant mothers […], with mothers with less than a high school education […], or from single-parent families […]. There is a statistically significant interaction between education and duration of follow-up, indicating that the chances of falling into low-income categories vary with these covariates. However, trajectories of exposure to low income […] show that children from chronically poor families were more likely to come from single-parent rather than two-parent families (46.7% versus 7.0%), to have mothers with less than a high school diploma (28.4% versus 6.7%), and to have non-European immigrant mothers (20.4% versus 9.2%).» (p. 272-273)