A Multilevel Analysis of Mobility Disability in the United States Population: Educational Advantage Diminishes as Race-Ethnicity Poverty Gap Increases

Abstract: Until now, they idea that economic inequalities affect health outcomes remains of interest and a topic under debated. If disability can be considered an adequate indicator of health and an acceptable argument could be made that educational attainment is partially affected by "life changes", then investigating how educational attainment correlates with the likelihood of being "disable" and how it varies by level of social inequality in residential area may be of interest for research on health disparities. Microdata from the American Community Survey (ACS) 2009-2011 is used in a hierarchical logistic model that accounts for various person-level factors and differences in race-ethnicity poverty gap at the Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA) level. After nesting a total of 3,752,372 observations over 2,055 PUMAs, results indicate that risk for mobility disability decreases with educational attainment and that this protective effect decreases as the race-ethnicity poverty gap in the PUMA increases. Because unjust and avoidable health disparities should be mitigated, future work should continue on the topic.