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

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.