APPENDIX: THE LEVERAGING MOBILITY STUDY

TOXIC INEQUALITY DRAWS UPON THE LEVERAGING MOBILITY Study, a unique database of family interviews collected at two points, from 1998 to 1999 and 2010 to 2012. My colleagues and I initially used census tract data to identify residential neighborhoods in the metropolitan areas of Boston, St. Louis, and Los Angeles that fit the demographic characteristics of the communities we wanted to draw interviews from: white and black middle-income and lower-income communities. I selected a few communities within each metropolitan area from which to interview families with young, school-age children.

Our main recruiting strategy was to approach day-care facilities. I drew up a list of these facilities in the target areas and visited them, introducing the study and myself and then asking permission to use their center to inform families about the study and recruit participants. Only one of the ten centers I approached refused to cooperate. After each family interview, we used what is called a snowball sampling method, whereby we asked families to suggest other families with young children in their neighborhood who might also agree to be interviewed. This moved the study sample outside the day-care centers.

Interviews took place in the participant’s home or in another place of their choosing and lasted one to three hours each. Each participant reviewed an informed consent form, signed it, and agreed to be interviewed. We promised, to the best of our abilities, not to divulge participants’ identities by protecting the data, reporting certain data only in the aggregate, and stripping out personal data such as names, places of employment, and communities of residence. Further, in any subsequent publications or presentations, we would change family names and other possible identifying information, such as job titles, places of work, and street addresses, to maintain their anonymity. Thus the names used in this book are pseudonyms. All participants received an honorarium for their time. The 184 interviews were recorded, transcribed, and organized into a qualitative data-analysis software package and stored on a secured server that limits Institute on Assets and Social Policy (IASP) access.

At baseline, families had children aged between three and ten years old; most were five years old. More than twelve years later, when we conducted the second wave of 137 interviews between 2010 and 2012, these children were at the end of their high school careers or beyond; the parents were between forty and sixty years old and in the latter half of their working lives. The Leveraging Mobility Study team did an amazing job of finding families twelve years later, telling them about the follow-on interviews, and obtaining participation. Because I had not originally anticipated that the study would evolve into another phase, there had been no attempt since the first interviews to maintain contact with or track the sample of families. As the need to understand the wealth/well-being/mobility connections became more urgent during the Great Recession, the opportunity to follow up with our families became the centerpiece of a large research project. Fortunately, a funder stepped forward. The majority lived in the same city or nearby, but a few had moved to other states, where we contacted and interviewed them.

The baseline and follow-up interviews covered information about the children’s education histories and the adults’ previous and current community or communities of residence, household incomes and expenditures, household wealth and debt, work histories, family financial and nonfinancial assistance received, and reflections about their economic security and decisions they had made related to using their assets.

The Ford Foundation generously funded the Leveraging Mobility Study. Without Kilolo Kijakazi’s leadership, vision, and support, the 2010–2012 set of interviews would not have happened. She set this work in the critical context of a national initiative to close the racial wealth gap. Kilolo has my deepest admiration and total appreciation.

Selected characteristics for families in the Leveraging Mobility Study are described in Table A.1.