An Intergenerational Assessment of Multiethnic Residential Integration in the United States

• In Event: 2284 - The Contemporary City and Neighborhood Change

Abstract

A major challenge to the study of racial and ethnic residential integration is the difficulty of separating structural opportunities for increased residential contact from genuine social change toward sharing residential spaces with members of racial and ethnic outgroups. The number of multiethnic neighborhoods has steadily risen in recent decades. Yet, the stability of neighborhoods containing mixtures of white majority and minority residents is often called into question. This study takes an intergenerational approach to separate structural causes of increased residential integration—e.g., immigration leading to greater levels of population diversity—from the growing acceptance homeseekers have (or not) toward racial and ethnic integration. This approach also allows us to consider how neighborhood contexts during childhood, social mobility, and college education facilitate and/or hinder residential integration over the life course. The data for this study come from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the U.S. Census. The unit of analysis is the family household, and the outcome is an intergenerational residential mobility matrix across a temporally fixed taxonomy of ethnoracially mixed origin and destination census tracts. Conditional logit models—a derivative of log-linear modeling (Breen 1994; Logan 1983)—are used to compare the extent of spatial reproduction and mobility for white and black families across homogeneous and mixed neighborhood types. These models also incorporate key life course determinants of spatial mobility. Estimates of the (im)mobility parameters from these models are independent from the structural change that occurs along the margins of the mobility matrix. The sociological implications of this research speak to theories of spatial incorporation that frame debates about the changing nature of race and ethnic relations in the United States.

Author

• Jeremy Pais, University of Connecticut