Life-course trajectories of exposure to affluence and poverty in neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces

Social exposure is typically studied within isolated domains, such as neighborhoods, schools, or workplaces, yet individuals encounter these environments concurrently in their daily lives. In this study, using nearly 30 years of individual-level data on schoolmates, colleagues, and neighbors, we track lower secondary school students into adulthood and examine whether exposure to affluence and poverty in key life domains—neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces—overlaps, how it changes over the life course, and for whom trajectories of exposure differ. Our findings document strong correlations in exposure to affluence and poverty across different domains and highly stratified trajectories of exposure over the life course by socioeconomic background. We also find that 17% of individuals from the lowest-income backgrounds are consistently exposed to high-income contexts across all three domains. These results underscore the enduring inequality in exposure to affluence and poverty over the life course and highlight the potential of socioeconomic integration to disrupt cycles of segregation.