The Pew Research Center has disclosed the supporting credits and rigorous methodology employed for its latest analysis concerning single Black adults in the United States. The research was primarily funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and received additional support from the People & Voices Initiative. To ensure the study's academic and social grounding, the Center consulted a panel of experts, including Camille Burge-Hicks of Villanova University, Shantel Buggs of Florida State University, and Sean Joe of Washington University in St. Louis.
The report was authored by senior researcher Gabriel Piña, former research associate Ziyao Tian, and Mark Hugo Lopez, the director of race and ethnicity research. Editorial oversight was managed by Sahana Mukherjee, Dalia Fahmy, and former senior researcher Kiana Cox. The project's design, including the survey questionnaire, was a collaborative effort between Mukherjee, Cox, and former research associate Khadijah Edwards, with analytical support from Carolyne Im. Methodological guidance was provided by a team of specialists, including Courtney Kennedy, Dorene Asare-Marfo, Dana Popky, Andrew Mercer, and Arnold Lau, while communications strategies were led by Tanya Arditi and Zoe McMahon.
Technically, the data was derived from Wave 174 of the American Trends Panel (ATP), which is a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults. The survey period took place between June 16 and June 29, 2025. Out of 12,032 sampled individuals, 6,871 responded, resulting in a survey-level response rate of 58%. The final sample was composed of 3,657 respondents from the ATP and an oversample of 3,214 Black Americans sourced from the SSRS Opinion Panel. The margin of sampling error for the full group of 6,871 respondents is plus or minus 2.1 percentage points.
To achieve higher precision for smaller demographic subgroups, the survey utilized oversamples of Black and non-Hispanic Asian adults, which were subsequently weighted to accurately reflect their proportions within the general U.S. population. The data collection was executed by SSRS through a combination of online interfaces (6,339 respondents) and live telephone interviews (532 respondents), conducted in both English and Spanish. Since 2018, the ATP has utilized address-based sampling (ABS) to recruit participants, targeting households from the U.S. Postal Service’s Computerized Delivery Sequence File, which covers an estimated 90% to 98% of the population.
A sophisticated income adjustment process was applied to the findings to account for geographic cost-of-living differences and household size. Using Regional Price Parities (RPP) published by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the researchers adjusted reported family incomes based on the specific metropolitan or non-metro area of the participant. For instance, the study noted that a family earning $40,400 in the relatively inexpensive Pine Bluff area of Arkansas possesses similar financial standing to a family earning $58,900 in the more expensive San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley area of California.
Based on these adjustments, the Center established income tiers relative to the median adjusted family income of all ATP members, which was approximately $74,100 (expressed in 2023 dollars and scaled to a three-person household). Consequently, 'middle-income' adults were defined as those in families with adjusted incomes between $49,400 and $148,200. Lower-income families were categorized as those earning less than $49,400, while upper-income families earned more than $148,200.
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