The goal of this project is to develop a more efficient database workflow and structure to better support the community of researchers using the Self-Sufficiency Standard.
The Self-Sufficiency Project seeks to answer:
The U.S. Official Poverty Measure (OPM)
The U.S. Official Poverty Measure is too low to define the real cost of living for working families at a minimally adequate level with flawed and problematic methodology, and societal changes have not been reflected in the measure’s calculation. The OPM is used to set eligibility for critical benefits (e.g. food assistance, child care subsidies, or housing vouchers). Many families who are unable to afford their basic needs are not considered “in need” by the OPM and cannot access these supports.
The Self-Sufficiency Standard (SSS)
The Self-Sufficiency Standard was created by Dr. Diana Pearce to provide an alternative to the OPM by defining the income working families need to meet their basic necessities without public or private assistance. The costs include housing, child care, food, transportation, health care, miscellaneous expenses (broadband, cell phone, clothing, telephone, household items), and taxes (minus federal and state tax credits) plus an additional calculation for emergency savings. The Standard is calculated for 719 different family types for each county or area in a state. When the CWW has an active partnership in a state, they create state-specific reports which summarize the main findings about how much it takes to make ends meet in those states. The CWW also works with partners who utilize the SSS to create benchmarks for programmatic success. You can learn more about the Standard here.
Primary Stakeholders:
The database will enable the primary managers of the SSS data collection to efficiently pull the data needed for analysis and create visualizations and reports. Some potential analyses include looking at changes over time for a specific county, which would have been a difficult task with the data outside one single database.
Center for Women’s Welfare (CWW)
We collaborated with the Center for Women’s Welfare to understand what specific features were necessary when designing the database. Specifically, they shared how their current workflow for accessing recorded data and what analyses are a priority for furthering their research.
Research Scientists at the eScience Institute:
The team’s data scientist and additional researchers at eScience helped address questions related to database design, data science procedures, and working with object-oriented programming.
DSSG Fellows:
As domain experts, the fellows held a large stake in organizing the information, defining the relationship between tables, and identifying the overall purpose of the database.
Secondary Stakeholders:
The Center for Women’s Welfare plans to share out the data they query from the database with community partners to conduct analyses for their state or area of interest. Community organizations, academic researchers, policy institutes, legal advocates, training providers, community action agencies, and state and local officials, among others, use the Standard. The Standard is used for:
The Standard is used for:
Stakeholder Meetings:
For the DSSG project, we met with the following stakeholders:
Shelan Aldridge, Special Grants Project Manager for the Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County
The WDC uses the Standard in a Calculator tool that provides financial counseling to customers, and evaluates customer outcomes such as measuring the number of people who reached self-sufficiency by gender, age, race, and ethnicity
Charles Brennan, Deputy Director of Research at the Colorado Center on Law and Policy (CCLP)
The CCLP uses the Standard to help Coloradans working in low-wage jobs receive better wages and support employment through child-care assistance and refundable tax credits
Dr. Diana Pearce, Founder of the Self-Sufficiency Standard
Dr. Pearce utilizes the Self-Sufficiency Standard to validate costs for testimony as an expert-witness in Congress (e.g., traffic violations)
The main ethical concern of database creation is transparent processes for our stakeholders with varying technical backgrounds. The documentation and workflow should be clear and reproducible for our project leads and community partners beyond the scope of the 10-week project period. In addition to providing rigorous documentation of the code, our team will address these concerns by creating a training framework that includes a visual representation of the database, how it can be accessed, its functionality, and how users can interact with the tools. While the Self-Sufficiency Standard follows several criteria to ensure the Standard is as consistent and accurate as possible, ongoing concerns surround keeping costs up to date with economic events such as inflation and acknowledging that certain factors or costs may be left out of the Standard.