Meg Bea & Mariana Amorim (Washington State University) have been awarded an NIH R21 award for their project “Within-Year Debt Fluctuations, Stress, and Health.”
“This project will collect high-frequency data to understand how short-term changes in debt amounts and sources of debt impact stress, anxiety, and depression among lower income individuals,” Bea shares, “we are looking forward to working with the UW Survey Center team to field this novel smartphone survey.”
Congratulations Meg & Mariana!
Review the project abstract below:
Lower-income Americans increasingly rely on a range of unsecured debt sources (e.g., credit cards, payday loans) to help manage expenses, likely contributing to frequent fluctuations in debt levels throughout the year. Frequent fluctuations in debt amounts, use of certain debt sources, or for particular reasons (e.g., managing unexpected expenses) may be adaptive, helping individuals to reduce stress and anxiety related to financial management. Yet, in some cases, these fluctuations may be harmful, increasing experiences of stress, anxiety, and depression. Due to existing survey limitations, we know little about experiences of within-year changes in debt and their potential role as health stressors or stress-reducers for lower-income individuals. The R21 project will systematically capture short-term changes in debt amounts and composition and evaluate associations with generalized stress, anxiety, and depression. The project has three specific aims: 1) Field a novel smartphone survey that collects biweekly self- reported health, income, and debt data from 410 lower-income adults for one year. The development of a biweekly survey on debt is supported by prior research that underscores the importance of capturing short-term fluctuations in income to understand economic insecurity of lower-income individuals and families. The proposed survey addresses the lack of short-term data on debt holdings across a range of unsecured and understudied sources. 2) Develop standard measures of within-year fluctuations in debt burdens across debt sources using data collected from the survey. In doing so, we introduce the concept and measurement of within- year debt fluctuations to the multidisciplinary literature on debt and health. 3) Analyze the data to provide the first insights on the scope of lower-income individuals’ experiences with short- term debt fluctuations and consequences for health, with attention to variation by race. The study is the first to collect high-frequency data on debt and health via mobile surveys, with implications for advancing data collection efforts in this area. Findings will inform economic and family policy, with insights on how addressing debt fluctuations in addition to overall debt burdens in policy design may have positive public health impacts. Data created through this project will be made publicly available to advance research across disciplines concerning family functioning, poverty, and health.