Media Consumption and Racial Residential Preferences

• In Event: 4346 - Producing Race: The Everyday Makings of Racial Distinctions and Inequality

Abstract

To what extent do offline, online, and ethnic media consumption, as dominant and counter-dominant forms of public discourse, connect to where people prefer to live? We seek to unpack whether media consumption interacts with attitudes towards population demographic changes to influence such preferences. Using the Texas Diversity Survey (n = 1,322), we run a series of logit regression models, stratified by respondent race (Black, Latinx, Multiracial, and White), to measure the relationship between online and offline media consumption and our key outcome variable, racial residential preferences, independent of controls such as general beliefs about population change and demographic characteristics. We find that racial residential preferences are shaped not only by expected attributes (e.g. age, education, racial composition of current neighborhood of residence) but also by existing attitudes toward racial diversity and whether media is consumed online or offline, especially for people of color. For Whites, preferences are shaped by media source, with Whites who consume ethnic media being significantly more likely to prefer living in Black and Latinx communities. These findings suggest that public discourse is connected to residential preference formation and a ‘sense of group position’—but how this happens depends on the media source as well as the group in question.

Authors

• Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, University of New Mexico

• Sylvia Emmanuel, Texas A&M

• Mary Elizabeth Campbell, Texas A&M University

• Verna M. Keith, University of Alabama-Birmingham