Examining Variation in Access to Internet and Computers Across Illinois Neighborhoods

• In Event: 41054 - Urban Sociology and the Legacy of Chicago

Abstract

While access to high-speed internet and personal computers is generally high, Illinois has been highlighted as a particularly heterogeneous state (File and Ryan 2014). To better understand this heterogeneity, I argue for a geographically-centered and inductive intersectional approach to understanding access (Easton et al. 2020; Werner et al. 2023) To implement this, I use data from the American Community Survey 2019 and 2022 5-year estimates to separate Illinois census tracts into six different socio-demographic neighborhood types using latent profile analysis. To address the limits of latent profile analysis, I examine the variation within neighborhood types and how this relates to spatial distribution across the state. All six neighborhood types were found within Chicago, meaning Chicago has some representation of neighborhood types found across the state. However, sociodemographic patterns to access within Chicago did not apply to the patterns in rural Illinois. In the Chicago and Saint Louis area, low-neighborhoods tended to have a younger, majority Hispanic and Latinx population, with below-average income (neighborhood type 2) or a majority Black, high-poverty, high-unemployment population with an average income less than two-thirds the state average (neighborhood type 3). In rural Illinois, low-access neighborhoods tended to have an older, majority white population with mid-wage jobs (neighborhood type 4). While neighborhood type 4 had the greatest variation in access within rural Illinois, this was not true within Chicago and Saint Louis, where neighborhood type 3 had the greatest variation in access across types. Rather than evaluating socio-demographic characteristics separately, intersectional and geographically-centered analysis moves beyond a single association of socio-demographic characteristics, such as race/ethnicity and income, with lower or higher access, and instead shows a multitude of context-dependent associations.

Author

• Della Cox, University of Chicago