Conclusions

We wrote this book with the central goal of documenting patterns and trends of racial and ethnic segregation across communities and over time in the United States using refined methods of measurement analysis, which can sometimes be expected to change what we thought we knew from past research and at other times add more to our understanding of established patterns. In making this our goal, we produced several contributions that happily build continuity with past research and set a foundation for future research, which we can expect to come in waves each time there is a decennial census data release. First and foremost, by using measures of segregation that are free of index bias and specifically employing the separation index, a measure of evenness that can dependably signal when prototypical patterns of segregation are occurring, we were able to reanalyze and describe patterns and levels of racial and ethnic residential segregation across the United States and over time. We are not the first to describe patterns of segregation, here operationalized as the uneven distribution of two groups across neighborhood-level spatial units, across communities and over time in the United States. But we are the first to simultaneously use measures that are corrected for index bias, measure segregation of households rather than persons, and expand our analysis to not only metropolitan areas but also micropolitan areas and noncore counties. Our findings should be viewed as reliable benchmarks for descriptive analyses of racial and ethnic residential segregation across a broad range of communities moving forward and should also be taken instructively, as they demonstrate the application of the methodological changes that we recommend should be the standard for residential segregation measurement. We also use Fossett’s (2017) difference-of-means calculation of segregation indices to demonstrate new approaches for linking locational attainments to residential segregation patterns, situating segregation quantitatively as a stratification outcome. In this final chapter, we describe how this study establishes continuity with past research and sets the path for residential segregation research in the future.