Growing evidence supports the hypothesis that income inequality within a nation influences health outcomes net of the effect of any given household's absolute income. We tested the hypothesis that state-level income inequality in the United States is associated with increased family burden for care and health-related expenditures for low-income families of children with special health care needs. We analyzed the 2005-06 wave of the National Survey of Children with Special Health Care Needs, a probability sample of approximately 750 children with special health care needs in each state and the District of Columbia in the US Our measure of state-level income inequality was the Gini coefficient. Dependent measures of family caregiving burden included whether the parent received help arranging or coordinating the child's care and whether the parent stopped working due to the child's health. Dependent measures of family financial burden included absolute burden (spending in past 12 months for child's health care needs) and relative burden (spending as a proportion of total family income). After controlling for a host of child, family, and state factors, including family income and measures of the severity of a child's impairments, state-level income inequality has a significant and independent association with family burden related to the health care of their children with special health care needs. Families of children with special health care needs living in states with greater levels of income inequality report higher rates of absolute and relative financial burden.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 4. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 27 January 2012.
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#8,185,440
of 25,371,288 outputs
Outputs from Social Science & Medicine
#7,034
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Outputs of similar age
#69,483
of 247,007 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Social Science & Medicine
#41
of 59 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 25,371,288 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 67th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 11,874 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 18.8. This one is in the 40th percentile – i.e., 40% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 59 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 30th percentile – i.e., 30% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
