Skill-Based Contextual Sorting: How Parental Cognition and Residential Mobility Produce Unequal Environments for Children

• In Event: 1451 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 15. Socioeconomic Segregation

Abstract

Highly skilled parents deploy distinct strategies to cultivate their children’s development, but little is known about how parental cognitive skills interact with metropolitan opportunity structures and
residential mobility to shape a major domain of inequality in children’s lives—the neighborhood. We integrate multiple literatures to develop hypotheses on parental skill-based sorting by neighborhood income and school quality, which are then tested by analyzing an original follow-up of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey. These data include over a decade’s worth of residential histories for households with children that are linked to census, geographic information system, and educational measures. We construct a discrete choice model of neighborhood selection that
accounts for heterogeneity among household types, incorporates the unique spatial structure of Los Angeles County, and includes a wide range of neighborhood factors. Our results show that parents’ cognitive skills interact with neighborhood affluence to predict neighborhood selection after accounting for, and confirming, the expected influence of race, income, education, housing market conditions, and spatial proximity. Moreover, among middle and upper-class parents, cognitive skills predict sorting on K-12 school quality, specifically, rather than neighborhood status generally. We thus reveal skill-based contextual sorting as an overlooked driver of urban stratification.

Authors

• Jared N. Schachner, Harvard University

• Robert J. Sampson, Harvard University