Economics of grandparents raising grandchildren after the 2008 recession-analyzing ACS datasets for the years 2007 and 2011

Abstract

The current cross sectional quantitative study examined the structural and historical trends of social and economic effects on grandparents who raised grandchildren before and after the Great Recession of 2008. The study focused on the time period of 2007 and 2011 and analyzed the American Community Survey, which was made available for public use on the IPUMS website. The variables analyzed were individual, familial, and structural. The economic variation in income for the 2007 and 2011 time period is the main focus of this study, while age, citizenship employment status, education, gender, marital status, race, family size, relationship to head of the house, and location are the other variables that were analyzed as well. After running the multivariate test the analysis revealed the variables with the most variation from 2007 to 2011 were employment status, gender, and education.