The Micro-Level Dynamics of Racial and Ethnic Residential Segregation

Segregation is often viewed and studied as a macro-level phenomenon, described in terms of aggregate patterns across areas. Empirical analyses of segregation are typically conducted at the macro-level as well, explaining changes and variations in segregation through contextual-level factors such as population size, region, or percent White. However, there is an established body of literature that recognizes segregation as an outcome of micro-level processes of locational attainments and residential mobility that considers the role of household characteristics like income, education, and nativity. This work is fundamentally important for testing the dominant theoretical frameworks employed in segregation research, which largely emphasize that segregation is driven by micro-level characteristics and processes and center the barriers and opportunities in residential mobility. Additionally, the locational attainments approach can be linked with outcomes that are essentially consequences of segregation such as educational disparities, health disparities, and unequal exposure to crime. While both levels of analyses are important, a fundamental link between them has been missing which could explicate how locational attainments directly produce residential segregation patterns. In this final empirical chapter, we draw on Fossett’s (2017) difference-of-means approach to calculating segregation indices to establish a direct quantitative link between predicted outcomes from household-level locational attainment models and overall residential segregation outcomes at the community level. This approach opens up a new toolbox of methods that are popular in inequality studies, including regression standardization and decomposition, which allow us to analyze residential segregation as a stratification outcome. We perform this analysis on 25 metropolitan areas with a focus on White-Black, White-Latino, and White-Asian residential segregation in 2010. We find that White-Black segregation is largely attributable to differences in rates of return on resources relevant for locational attainments, while White-Latino and White-Asian segregation can be explained more by group differences in characteristics and resources such as income and nativity.