Pathways to SSI across the Life Course

Background and Purpose: Supplemental Security Income (SSI) eligibility is conditioned on two primary factors: poverty and disability or older age. Yet, little is known about the complex and intersecting life course events that lead people to take up SSI. Most studies that do exist are quantitative and focus on macro-level economic factors or policy incentives that could induce low-wage workers to leave the labor force and receive income through SSI benefits instead. Informed by life course theories of cumulative dis/advantage, this study aims to provide a more robust narrative about the turning points and trajectories that lead people to take up SSI.

Methods: This paper uses nationally representative, qualitative interview data from the American Voices Project (AVP) to describe the events and factors that lead to people taking up SSI at different points in the life course. The AVP consists of 1,613 respondents selected through a nationally representative, probabilistic sampling approach that oversampled high-poverty areas. We identified all SSI recipients in the data (N = 86). We took a flexible, iterative, abductive approach to qualitative coding (Deterding & Waters, 2018). Through coding, we used thematic and narrative analysis to identify themes.

Results: Preliminary findings suggest widespread experiences of childhood trauma, intimate partner/domestic violence in adolescence and adulthood, incarceration, lifelong caregiving, disrupted educational trajectories and economic & relational instability that all compound and contribute to disability, poverty, labor force withdrawal and SSI takeup. Many recipients treated SSI as their last resort after being unable to maintain employment given their disability and other life circumstances.

Conclusions and Implications: In highlighting the life course events that lead people to SSI, this research identifies lifelong, compounding structural barriers to full economic participation among low-income, low-asset disabled people and key intervention points to improve policy going forward.