Tag Archives | Segregation

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Segregation—whether across schools, neighborhoods, or occupations—is regularly invoked as a cause of social and economic disparities. However, segregation is a complicated causal treatment: what do we mean when we appeal to a world in which segregation does not exist? One could take societal contexts as the unit of analysis and compare across societies with differing levels of segregation. In practice, it is more common for studies of segregation to take persons or households as the unit of analysis within a single societal context, focusing on what would happen if particular individuals were counterfactually assigned to social positions in a more equitable way. Taking this latter framework, this article shows how to study segregation as a cause. The first step is to theorize a counterfactual assignment rule: what would it mean to assign people to social positions equitably? The second step is to identify the causal effect of those social positions and simulate counterfactual outcomes. The third step is to interpret results as the impact of a unit-level (rather than society-level) intervention. A running example and empirical analysis illustrates the approach by studying the causal effect of occupational segregation on a racial health gap.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Ian Lundberg: Department of Sociology, UCLA.
E-mail: ianlundberg.org, ianlundberg@ucla.edu.

Acknowledgments: For helpful discussions and feedback relevant to this project, I thank Brandon Stewart, Matthew Salganik, Dalton Conley, Sara McLanahan, Rebecca Johnson, Gillian Slee, and participants in presentations at the Princeton Department of Sociology, the Cornell Center for the Study of Inequality, and the UCSF Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, as well as the editor and anonymous reviewers. The author benefited from facilities and resources provided by the California Center for Population Research at UCLA (CCPR), which receives core support (P2C-HD041022) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development or the National Institutes of Health.

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Reproducibility Package: doi.org/10.7910/DVN/TB5Q4N.

Citation: Lundberg, Ian. 2025. “The Causal Impact of Segregation on a Disparity: A Gap-Closing Approach” Sociological Science 12: 871-890.
Received: July 15, 2025
Accepted: August 31, 2025
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Maria Abascal
DOI: 10.15195/v12.a35

Does Unprecedented Mass Immigration Fuel Ethnic Discrimination? A Two-Wave Field Experiment in the German Housing Market

By Parker Webservices on October 10, 2023 in Articles

Katrin Auspurg, Renate Lorenz, Andreas Schneck

Sociological Science October 10, 2023
10.15195/v10.a23

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Literature suggests that sudden mass immigration can fuel xenophobic attitudes. However, there is a lack of reliable evidence on hostile actions, such as discrimination. In this study, we leverage the unexpected mass immigration of refugees to Germany in 2015 in combination with a two-wave field experiment to study the effect of immigration on ethnic discrimination. In 2015/2016, political and social tensions in the Middle East and North Africa led to a historic mass migration to European countries. We carried out a large-scale field experiment on ethnic housing market discrimination in Germany (paired e-mail correspondence test with ~5,000 e-mail applications to rental housing units in each wave) shortly before this “European refugee crisis” (1st wave). We repeated this experiment at the peak of the crisis (2nd wave of our experiment). By taking advantage of the unexpected refugee immigration between the two waves of our experiment and the quasi-random allocation of refugees across regions for causal identification, we find no credible evidence that the large influx of refugees changed the extent of ethnic discrimination of Turks in the rental housing market. This result holds regardless of the extent to which regions within Germany were already accustomed to immigration before the refugee crisis.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Katrin Auspurg: LMU Munich, Department of Sociology
E-mail: katrin.auspurg@lmu.de

Renate Lorenz: LMU Munich, Department of Sociology
E-mail: renate.lorenz@soziologie.uni-muenchen.de

Andreas Schneck: LMU Munich, Department of Sociology
E-mail: andreas.schneck@lmu.de

Acknowledgements: We thank the participants of the Annual Conference of Experimental Sociology (ACES) 2021, the Research Colloquium of the Doctoral School of Social Sciences at the University of Trento (2022) and the Social Science Research Colloquium at the TU Kaiserslautern (2022) for helpful suggestions. We are grateful for comments on earlier versions we received from Madison Garrett. Maximilian Sonnauer helped us compiling the database for the field experiments.

Citation: Auspurg, Katrin, Renate Lorenz, and Andreas Schneck. 2023. “Does Unprecedented Mass Immigration Fuel Ethnic Discrimination? A Two-Wave Field Experiment in the German Housing Market.” Sociological Science 10: 640-666.
Received: December 17, 2022
Accepted: April 17, 2023
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Maria Abascal
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a23

Inclusive but Not Integrative: Ethnoracial Boundaries and the Use of Spanish in the Market for Rental Housing

By Parker Webservices on September 26, 2023 in Articles

Ariela Schachter, John Kuk, Max Besbris, and Garrett Pekarek

Sociological Science September 26, 2023
10.15195/v10.a21

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Increasing Spanish fluency in the United States likely shapes ethnoracial group boundaries and inequality. We study a key site for group boundary negotiations—the housing market—where Spanish usage may represent a key source of information exchange between landlords and prospective renters. Specifically, we examine the use of Spanish in advertisements for online rental housing and its effect on White, Black, and Latinx Americans’ residential preferences. Using a corpus of millions of Craigslist rental listings, we show that Spanish listings are concentrated in majority-Latinx neighborhoods with greater proportions of immigrant and Spanish-speaking residents. Furthermore, units that are advertised in Spanish tend be lower priced relative to non-Spanish ads in the same neighborhood. We then use a survey experiment to demonstrate that Spanish usage decreases White, Black, and non-Spanish-speaking Latinx Americans’ interest in a housing unit and surrounding neighborhood, whereas Spanish-speaking Latinx respondents are less affected. We discuss these findings in light of past work on neighborhood demographic preferences, segregation, and recent theorizing on within-category inequality.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Ariela Schachter: Department of Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis
E-mail: ariela@wustl.edu

John Kuk: Department of Political Science, Michigan State University
E-mail: jskuk@msu.edu

Max Besbris: Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
E-mail: besbris@wisc.edu

Garrett Pekarek: Department of Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis
E-mail: g.e.pekarek@wustl.edu

Acknowledgements: For their generous and thoughtful engagement with previous drafts, we gratefully acknowledge René Flores and Elizabeth Korver-Glenn. We thank Maddy Molina and Leslye Quintanilla for their support as research assistants. This work has been supported by the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University and is based on work supported by National Science Foundation (grants 1947591 and 1947598).

Citation: Schachter, Ariela, John Kuk, Max Besbris, and Garrett Pekarek. 2023. “Inclusive but Not Integrative: Ethnoracial Boundaries and the Use of Spanish in the Market for Rental Housing.” Sociological Science 10: 585-612.
Received: March 6, 2023
Accepted: March 22, 2023
Editors: Ari Adut, Filiz Garip
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a21

The Social Context of Racial Boundary Negotiations: Segregation, Hate Crime, and Hispanic Racial Identification in Metropolitan America

By Jesper Sorensen on February 8, 2016 in Articles

Michael T. Light, John Iceland

Sociological Science, February 08, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a4

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How the influx of Hispanics is reshaping the U.S. racial landscape is a paramount question in sociology. While previous research has noted the significant differences in Hispanics’ racial identifications from place to place, there are comparatively few empirical investigations explaining these contextual differences. We attempt to fill this gap by arguing that residential context sets the stage for racial boundary negotiations and that certain environments heighten the salience of inter-group boundaries. We test this argument by examining whether Hispanics who live in highly segregated areas and areas that experience greater levels of anti-Hispanic prejudice are more likely to opt out of the U.S. racial order by choosing the “other race” category in surveys. Using data from the American Community Survey and information on anti-Hispanic hate crimes from the FBI, we find support for these hypotheses. These findings widen the theoretical scope of the roles segregation and prejudice play in negotiating racial identifications, and have implications for the extent to which Hispanics may redefine the U.S. racial order.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Michael T. Light: Purdue University. Email: mlight@purdue.edu

John Iceland: Department of Sociology and Criminology, Pennsylvania State University. Email: jdi10@psu.edu

Acknowledgements: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting for the Population Association of America in San Francisco in 2012. The authors thank Sal Oropesa for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. We also thank Andrew Raridon for his research assistance.

Citation: Michael T. Light and John Iceland. 2016. “The Social Context of Racial Boundary Negotiations: Segregation, Hate Crime, and Hispanic Racial Identification in Metropolitan America”. Sociological Science 3: 61-84.
Received: October 20, 2015.
Accepted: November 28, 2015.
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Mario Small
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a4

The Buffering Hypothesis: Growing Diversity and Declining Black-White Segregation in America’s Cities, Suburbs, and Small Towns?

By Jesper Sorensen on March 25, 2015 in Articles

Domenico Parisi, Daniel T. Lichter, Michael C. Taquino

Sociological Science, March 25, 2015
DOI 10.15195/v2.a8

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The conventional wisdom is that racial diversity promotes positive race relations and reduces racial residential segregation between blacks and whites. We use data from the 1990–2010 decennial censuses and 2007–2011 ACS to test this so-called “buffering hypothesis.” We identify cities, suburbs, and small towns that are virtually all white, all black, all Asian, all Hispanic, and everything in between. The results show that the most racially diverse places—those with all four racial groups (white, black, Hispanic, and Asian) present—had the lowest black-white levels of segregation in 2010. Black-white segregation also declined most rapidly in the most racially diverse places and in places that experienced the largest recent increases in diversity. Support for the buffering hypothesis, however, is counterbalanced by continuing high segregation across cities and communities and by rapid white depopulation in the most rapidly diversifying communities. We argue for a new, spatially inclusive perspective on racial residential segregation.

Domenico Parisi: Department of Sociology, Mississippi State University. Email: mimmo.parisi@nsparc.msstate.edu

Daniel T. Lichter: Policy Analysis & Management and Sociology, Cornell University. Email: dtl28@cornell.edu

Michael C. Taquino: National Strategic Planning & Analysis Research Center, Mississippi State University. Email: mtaquino@nsparc.msstate.edu