BACKGROUND
Socioeconomic status (SES) impacts health outcomes. The Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), like many school‐based data sources, lacks individual‐level poverty information. We propose using school‐level percentages of student eligibility for free/reduced‐price meals (%FRPM) as a proxy for individual‐level poverty.
METHODS
Using the New York City (NYC) 2009 YRBS, we created school‐level poverty quartiles to append to individual YRBS records by ranking schools by %FRPM. We compared this with 2 other school‐level poverty measures using students' home and school neighborhood‐level poverty and measured the association of these 3 school‐level proxies with individual's household income. Last, we evaluated health outcomes by race/ethnicity and poverty to demonstrate the importance of accounting for poverty.
RESULTS
The school‐level measure that used %FRPM had the strongest association with household income. When the school‐level individual poverty proxy was included in illustrative analyses using YRBS data, patterns by poverty within race/ethnicity emerged that were not seen when looking at race/ethnicity alone.
CONCLUSIONS
Using a poverty measure to analyze school‐based data will provide a better understanding of the impact of SES on health outcomes. Based on our evaluation, when individual‐level information is not available, we propose using school‐level %FRPM, which are publicly available throughout the United States.