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.
1 The decision rule is: if the one-tailed critical t value is less than the observed t AND the means are in the right order, then we can reject H 0. 2  In this example, the critical t is 1.679 (from the table of critical t values) and the observed t is 1.410, so we fail to reject H 0.