Topics: Economics and Personal Finances, Socioeconomic Class. 1  Richard Fry is a senior researcher focusing on economics and education at Pew Research Center. 2  Rakesh Kochhar is an associate director of research at Pew Research Center.
In the United States, the Census Bureau determines who is poor using an economic poverty measure, by calculating official poverty estimates using a set of dollar-value thresholds, or minimum amount of income needed to meet basic needs, that vary by family size and composition.
A recent study by McIntosh et al. provocatively suggested that a patient-centered nonspecific supportive therapy may have been more helpful than cognitive behavior therapy or interpersonal therapy, as measured by a global rating of anorexia nervosa symptoms, in a sample of 56 underweight women with anorexia nervosa receiving treatment over a minimum of 20 weeks; unfortunately, the amount of weight gain was modest and not significantly different among the three study treatments.