Compounded Deprivation in the Transition to Adulthood: The Intersection of Racial and Economic Inequality Among Chicagoans, 1995–2013

Poverty in the United States is experienced in multidimensional and intersecting forms. Problems like severe income poverty, for example, often coincide with joblessness, housing insecurity, and family instability, all of which can be mutually reinforcing. In one of the most influential accounts of such hardship, The Truly Disadvantaged, William Julius Wilson (2012 [1987], 3) focuses on the social transformation of the inner city in the 1970s and 1980s— especially the decline of manufacturing jobs and the outmigration of the black middle class—that disproportionately exposed poor African Americans to concentrated neighborhood disadvantage. He begins this account, however, by highlighting the “cycle of deprivation” that is generated by the concentration of poverty, female-headed families, joblessness, teenage pregnancy, and violence. The ensuing decades have witnessed considerable research on concentrated poverty, but the nature of “compounded deprivation” has been surprisingly understudied, in three major ways. First, much research in the tradition of The Truly Disadvantaged has focused on trying to separate the effects of poverty from its corThis paper investigates acute, compounded, and persistent deprivation in a representative sample of Chicago adolescents transitioning to young adulthood. Our investigation, based on four waves of longitudinal data from 1995 to 2013, is motivated by three goals. First, we document the prevalence of individual and neighborhood poverty over time, especially among whites, blacks, and Latinos. Second, we explore compounded deprivation, describing the extent to which study participants are simultaneously exposed to individual and contextual forms of deprivation—including material deprivation (such as poverty) and social-organizational deprivation (for example, low collective efficacy)—for multiple phases of the life course from adolescence up to age thirty-two. Third, we isolate the characteristics that predict transitions out of compounded and persistent poverty. The results provide new evidence on the crosscutting adversities that were exacerbated by the Great Recession and on the deep connection of race to persistent and compounded deprivation in the transition to adulthood.