In the following section we briefly review the theoretical and empirical research addressing the causes of poverty. Since our goal is to use this substantive issue to demonstrate the appropriate integration of spatial effects in regression models, this overview of spatial inequality in child poverty is deliberately brief and is included primarily to contextualize our analysis. Next we review the findings from the Friedman and Lichter article and examine the important contributions their research made to the poverty literature. Following this, we reanalyze their data, demonstrating how and why their model can benefit from modifications that incorporate spatial process effects. This section addresses an important emergent issue and therefore assumes a somewhat (hopefully useful) didactic structure. In the fifth section, we describe our research strategy, and, in a sixth section, we comment briefly on our results and compare these to the original findings. Finally, in a concluding section, we discuss the importance of this research as an example for demographers and others concerned with poverty who are undertaking analyses of geo-referenced data.