Peer-reviewed article
Pandemic-Related Black Family Well-Being Across North Carolina County Tiers: An Exploratory Cross-Sectional Study.
Okoli C, Esimaje TB, Smith N, Mulrooney TJ, Johnson F et al. ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study examined how Black families in North Carolina experienced pandemic-related stress, food hardship, health changes, and parenting disruption across different county economic tiers. The researchers surveyed 178 Black parents about stress, emotional symptoms, food hardship, health, sleep, work disruption, and parent-child interactions. Overall, families across all county tiers reported pandemic-related difficulties, but differences between tiers were mostly not statistically significant. The study concludes that county economic tier alone does not clearly explain differences in how families coped with the pandemic.
Key points
- Respondents across all county tiers reported pandemic-related burdens including stress, emotional symptoms, food hardship, sleep changes, and work disruption
- Most cross-tier comparisons were not statistically significant, indicating county tier classification did not consistently differentiate response patterns
- Only two items met statistical significance threshold: one food-hardship item (p = 0.050) and one parent-child interaction item (p = 0.042)
- One emotional symptom item approached statistical significance (p = 0.074) but isolated findings did not form a consistent pattern
- Larger longitudinal studies with neighborhood and household-level measures are needed before drawing tier-specific or causal conclusions
Limitations
This is a small cross-sectional study (n=178) that cannot establish causation or track changes over time. The reliance on county-tier classification alone, without neighborhood or household-level measures, may mask important sources of variation in family well-being.
Abstract
This exploratory cross-sectional study examined whether pandemic-related family well-being responses differed across North Carolina's 2021 county economic tiers among 178 Black parents. Survey responses were linked to county tier and included reported stress, emotional symptoms, food hardship, self-rated health, sleep change, work and parenting disruption, and parent-child interaction items. Primary analyses used the Kruskal-Wallis and chi-square tests; within-tier correlations and tier-stratified linear probability models were used for supplementary and descriptive purposes. Respondents across all tiers reported pandemic-related burdens, but most cross-tier comparisons were not statistically significant. One food-hardship item (p = 0.050) and one parent-child interaction item (p = 0.042) met the nominal 0.05 threshold, while one emotional symptom item approached significance (p = 0.074); these isolated findings did not form a consistent cross-domain pattern. The findings indicate that the county-tier classification was useful for organizing place-based comparisons but did not consistently differentiate response patterns in this sample. Larger, longitudinal studies using neighborhood- and household-level measures are needed before tier-specific or causal conclusions can be drawn.