Socioeconomic Segregation and Infant Health in the American Metropolitan, 1980-2000

• In Event: 393 - Section on Children and Youth Paper Session. Pre and Post-Natal Influences on Children

Abstract

Health scholars increasingly recognize not only the importance of place for health but the policy value of altering group contexts and infrastructure. Following larger sociological traditions emphasizing the importance of place as well as recent scholarship on the relationship between place and health disparities, we study the relationship between residential segregation and infant health. Though a large literature demonstrates important relationships between residential segregation and health, further study of these relationships is warranted given two recent trends. First, race-ethnic residential segregation that heavily marked the last century has since declined. Second, residential segregation by income and particularly education has increased over the same period. This trends obscure our understanding of the importance of residential segregation for health. For example, because education is an important progenitor of income, analyses focusing exclusively on increasing income segregation may mistakenly interpret observed relationships between income segregation and outcomes of interest. It may be that education segregation is the real driver of an outcome of interest such as health disparities. In our analysis, we use estimate the effects of different forms of residential segregation on infant health using a metropolitan fixed-effects model and new, more nuanced measures of different forms of residential segregation. We determine (1) the extent to which different forms of residential segregation have increased in importance over time as the bases of residential segregation have changed and (2) the extent to which the effects of different forms of residential segregation moderate and perhaps even compound one another over time.

Authors

• Megan Andrew, University of Notre Dame

• Margaret Hicken, University of Michigan