Economic Integration

For economic integration, our measure captures income, employment, satisfaction with employment situation, and the ability to meet different levels of unexpected expenses.

While respondents can choose among a wide range of answer options to describe their employment situation, we recode them according to the three categories used by the American Community Survey: “Employed”, “Not in Labor Force”, and “Unemployed”.

When recoding income, everyone who earns significantly more than the median income receives the highest possible integration score for this question.