Maria Krysan

Stereotypes and Segregation: Neighborhoods in the Detroit Area'

Two opposing hypotheses seek to explain why black-white residential segreration persists despite open housing laws. One perspective argues that discriminatory practices in the marketing of real estate are responsible. Another view contends that it is the preferences of both blacks and whites for their own neighborhoods that maintain segregation. Using data from the Detroit Area Study of 1976 and 1992, the authors test the hypothesis that stereotypes among whites play an important role in explaining their resistance to integrated neighborhoods. They conclude that stereotype use links white preferences to discriminatory real estate practices in a way that helps to explain the persistence of segregation in the Detroit area.

The residential preferences of Blacks and Whites: a four-metropolis analysis.

Abstract Three hypotheses seek to explain the persistence of residential segregation between blacks and whites in the United States: economic differentials, discrimination in housing and lending markets, and neighborhood preferences. The preferences hypothesis posits that both races wish to live in racially homogeneous neighborhoods. This article examines the preferences hypothesis by using recent interview data from metropolitan Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles. Race continues to be significant in the residential decision‐making process. Whites’ willingness to move into a neighborhood is inversely related to the density of blacks living there. Blacks prefer integrated neighborhoods, but ones with a substantial representation of blacks. Preferences differ significantly from one metropolis to another, with Detroit representing the extreme. In the other three metropolises, the preferences of blacks and whites do overlap sufficiently to offer hope for a decline in segregation, provided that the infl...

PRIVACY AND THE EXPRESSION OF WHITE RACIAL ATTITUDES A COMPARISON ACROSS THREE CONTEXTS

Sample survey data on white racial attitudes show a dramatic increase over time and by educational level in support for principles of racial equality, but lower levels of support, less change, and little relation to education for government policies to implement these principles. A frequent explanation is that the normative climate presently salient in the semipublic setting of a survey interview creates social desirability pressures, resulting in an overstatement of liberal racial attitudes, especially by more educated respondents. Using a tripartite survey-based experiment, the A. compares answers to racial attitude questions under three conditions of privacy: a standard survey condition where interviewers asked all questions; a modified face-to-face condition where respondents answered a subset of racial questions in a self-administered form; and a completely noninterviewer condition where questionnaires were mailed to and returned by respondents. Three hypotheses are investigated: (1) white respondents will express less liberal racial attitudes as privacy increases; (2) privacy effects are greatest for questions about the principles of racial equality and other traditional racial attitudes and least for questions about racial policies and symbolic racism; and (3) privacy effects are stronger among the highly educated, who are more aware of current norms and thus feel social desirability pressures with greater force. Results offer some support for the social desirability hypothesis, especially among more educated respondents. However, contrary to expectations, the effects occur more consistently for racial policies than traditional racial attitudes. Instead of treating privacy effects as errors in a simple sense, the A. draws on supplementary qualitative interviews to connect the survey results to the larger normative change in white racial attitudes. Other complicating factors, such as acquiescent tendencies among less educated respondents, are also considere

Whites who say they’d flee: Who are they, and why would they leave?

Questions have been raised about whether white flight—one factor contributing to U.S. residential segregation—is driven by racial, race-associated, or neutral ethnocentric concerns. I use closed- and open-ended survey data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality to explore who says they would leave and their reasons for doing so. Thirty-eight percent of white respondents said they would leave one of the integrated neighborhoods, with Detroiters and those endorsing negative racial stereotypes especially likely to do so. When asked why they might leave, whites focused on the negative features of integrated neighborhoods. Expressions of racial prejudice were also common, but neutral ethnocentrism rare. The results of an experiment asking about integration with Asians and Latinos are also discussed.

RESPONSE RATES AND RESPONSE CONTENT IN MAIL VERSUS FACE-TO-FACE SURVEYS

Two surveys were administered based on the same area probability sampling frame and with some of the same questions: one sample was used for hour-long face-to-face interviewing in the 1992 Detroit Area Study; the other sample received a much shorter questionnaire in the mail for self-administration. The sample segments had previously been stratified in terms of the percentage that was black. For the predominantly white stratum, there was only a small difference in response rates due to mode of administration. For the predominantly black stratum, the mail survey obtained a considerably lower response rate then the face-to-face survey. Within the predominantly white stratum, there were no clear differences between results for the two modes of administration in demographic variables or in gross housing characteristics. However, the mail survey respondents expressed more negative attitudes toward racial integration and affirmative action than did the face-to-face respondents. Because the mail sample of the predominantly black stratum was small, it was not possible to carry out similar analyses of demographic or attitudinal differences, or to determine whether its lower response rate was due mainly to race, to correlates of race such as income MARIA KRYSAN is a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Michigan. HOWARD SCHUMAN is a research scientist in the Institute for Social Research and professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. LESLI JO SCOTT iS manager of the telephone facility at the Survey Research Center in the Institute for Social Research. PAUL BEATTY is a survey statistician at the Office of Research and Methodology at the National Center for Health Statistics. The authors wish to acknowledge advice and help from Charlotte Steeh (1992 Detroit Area Study director), Reynolds Farley (1992 Detroit Area Study faculty investigator), Michelle Mueller, and several other individuals connected with the 1992 Detroit Area Study. They received a number of useful comments on an earlier draft from Don Dillman. Willard Rodgers and James Lepkowski provided valuable assistance on calculating cluster effects. A grant to Howard Schuman from the National Science Foundation (SES-9212590) funded the mail survey component of this research. Funding for the 1992 Detroit Area Study came from the Ford Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the University of Michigan. Public Opinion Quarterly Volume 58:381-399 ? 1994 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research All rights reserved. 0033-362X/94/5803-0005

The Determinants of Neighborhood Satisfaction: Racial Proxy Revisited

02.50 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.25 on Mon, 12 Sep 2016 04:52:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 382 Krysan, Schuman, Scott, and Beatty or education, or even to problems with mail delivery in central cities.

Community Attraction and Avoidance in Chicago What’s Race Got to Do with It?

Understanding the factors that drive individuals’ residential preferences is a critical issue in the study of racial segregation. An important debate within this field is whether individuals—especially whites—prefer to live in predominantly white neighborhoods because they wish to avoid the social problems that may be more likely to occur in predominantly black neighborhoods (i.e., the racial proxy hypothesis) or because of racial factors that go beyond these social class–related characteristics. Through a multilevel analysis of data from the 2004–2005 Chicago Area Study and several administrative sources, we assess the extent to which the racial proxy hypothesis describes neighborhood satisfaction among whites, African Americans, and Latinos living across a broad range of neighborhood contexts. The racial proxy perspective applies weakly to whites’ satisfaction: whites report less satisfaction in neighborhoods with more minority residents, and only some of their dissatisfaction can be attributed to local social characteristics. The racial proxy hypothesis applies more strongly to blacks’ and Latinos’ satisfaction. In some cases, especially for Latinos, higher levels of satisfaction in integrated neighborhoods can largely be attributed to the fact that these places have better socioeconomic conditions and fewer social problems than predominantly minority communities. At the same time, effects of racial/ethnic composition persist in unique and somewhat divergent ways for blacks and Latinos, supporting the assertion that racial composition matters, above and beyond its relation to social class. Taken together, these findings suggest that individuals balance both socioeconomic and race-related concerns in their residential preferences.

A historical note on whites' beliefs about racial inequality

We argue that the relative persistence of racial segregation is due, at least in part, to the process of residential search and the perceptions upon which those searches are based—a critical but often-ignored component of the residential sorting process. We examine where Chicago-area residents would “seriously consider” and “never consider” living, finding that community attraction and avoidance are highly racialized. Race most clearly shapes the residential perceptions and preferences of whites, and matters the least to blacks. Latinos would seriously consider moving to numerous neighborhoods, but controls for demographics and distance from the respondents’ home make Latino preferences much like those of whites. Critically, the geography of existing segregation begets further segregation: distance from current community significantly affects perceptions of the communities into which respondents might move. While neighborhood perception may cause persistent segregation, it may also offer hope for integration with appropriate policy interventions.

Authoritarianism in the General Population: The Education Interaction Hypothesis

Beliefs about sources of the socioeconomic disadvantage suffered by blacks have been investigated by major continuing surveys since the 1970s. Results indicate that most whites tend to place responsibility mainly on blacks themselves, with the primary emphasis on a presumed lack of motivation on the part of blacks. Drawing on two survey questions used by the Gallup organization, we show that at the height of the civil rights movement in 1963, white respondents tended to blame whites and blacks equally for racial disadvantages, but that this changed sharply in the late 1960s. The change, which may well have been a reversion to pre-1960s beliefs, was probably a result of both the enactment of civil rights legislation, which supposedly ended racial discrimination, and the eruption of riots in Detroit, Newark, and other cities, which differed drastically from the earlier nonviolent protests in the South. This shift in public beliefs indicates that attributions of blame for socioeconomic disadvantage are not as fixed as later data suggest. Our analysis makes strategic use of a split-sample experiment to distinguish substantive change over time from change resulting from variations in the wording of survey questions

Moving Beyond the Big Three: A Call for New Approaches to Studying Racial Residential Segregation

The negative association between educational level and measures of authoritarianism has been recognized for many years. Here we present evidence that the problem is treated more usefully as one of statistical interaction: the relation of authoritarianism to other substantive measures is largely artifactual at lower educational levels, but is substantively more meaningful at higher educational levels