In this article, we propose that metropolitan areas represent differential “risk contexts” to the people who live within them and argue that growing insecurity in U.S. metropolitan areas arises out of cross-cutting economic weaknesses that are too often seen in isolation. The housing crisis that led up to the Great Recession was a moment in which the underlying vulnerabilities in our markets an…
This article focuses on stability and change in “mixed middle-income” neighborhoods. We first analyze variation across nearly two decades for all neighborhoods in the United States and in the Chicago area, particularly. We then analyze a new longitudinal study of almost 700 Chicago adolescents over an 18-year span, including the extent to which they are exposed to different neighborhood income …
At the center of Chicago’s large-scale public housing transformation is a stated emphasis on economic integration. Based on interviews, field observations, and documentary research in three new, mixed-income communities that were built on the footprint of former public housing developments in Chicago, this article examines how design choices and regulatory regimes militate against the effective…
A number of place-based policies attempt to deconcentrate poverty, yet not enough is known about how the socioeconomic mix of low-income neighborhoods evolves nor the role of residential mobility in this evolution. This study focuses on changes in low-income neighborhoods as they transpire at the micro level of housing unit turnover. Using a unique panel survey of low-income neighborhoods, the …
Over the past 40 years, assisted housing in the United States has undergone a dramatic geographic deconcentration, with at least one unit of assisted housing now located in most metropolitan neighborhoods. The location of assisted housing shapes where low-income assisted renters live, and it may also affect the residential choices of nonassisted residents. This article examines whether the deco…
Residential segregation, by definition, leads to racial and socioeconomic disparities in neighborhood conditions. These disparities may in turn produce inequality in social and economic opportunities and outcomes. Because racial and socioeconomic segregation are not independent of each other, however, any analysis of their causes, patterns, and effects must rest on an understanding of the joint…
Were black ghettos a product of white reaction to the Great Migration in the 1920s and 1930s, or did the ghettoization process have earlier roots? This article takes advantage of recently available data on black and white residential patterns in several major northern cities in the period 1880–1940. Using geographic areas smaller than contemporary census tracts, we trace the growth of black pop…
Despite the high levels of metropolitan-area segregation that Latinos experience, there is a lack of research examining the effects of segregation on Latino socioeconomic outcomes and whether those effects differ from the negative effects documented for African Americans. We find that segregation is consistently associated with lower levels of educational attainment and labor market success for…
This article provides a geographically inclusive empirical framework for studying changing U.S. patterns of Hispanic segregation. Whether Hispanics have joined the American mainstream depends in part on whether they translate upward mobility into residence patterns that mirror the rest of the nation. Based on block and place data from the 1990–2010 decennial censuses, our results provide eviden…
To deal with ever-larger datasets, media scholars are increasingly using computational analytic methods. This article focuses on how the traditional (manual) approach to conducting a content analysis—a primary method in the study of media messages—is being reconfigured, assesses what is gained and lost in turning to computational solutions, and builds on a “hybrid” approach to content analysis.…
Theoretical and empirical approaches to the design of effective messages to increase healthy and reduce risky behavior have shown only incremental progress. This article explores approaches to the development of a “recommendation system” for archives of public health messages. Recommendation systems are algorithms operating on dense data involving both individual preferences and objective messa…
Methods for analyzing neural and computational social science data are usually used by different types of scientists and generally seen as distinct, but they strongly complement one another. Computational social science methodologies can strengthen and contextualize individual-level analysis, specifically our understanding of the brain. Neuroscience can help to unpack the mechanisms that lead f…
The vast majority of social science research uses small (megabyte- or gigabyte-scale) datasets. These fixed-scale datasets are commonly downloaded to the researcher’s computer where the analysis is performed. The data can be shared, archived, and cited with well-established technologies, such as the Dataverse Project, to support the published results. The trend toward big data—including large-s…
With the rise of networked media such as Twitter, celebrities’ ability to speak on policy matters directly to the public has become amplified. We investigate the political implications of celebrity activism on Twitter by estimating the political ideology of thirty-four South Korean news outlets and fourteen political celebrities based on the co-following pattern among 1,868,587 Twitter users. W…
There is considerable controversy surrounding the study of presidential debates, particularly efforts to connect their content and impact. Research has long debated whether the citizenry reacts to what candidates say, how they say it, or simply how they appear. This study uses detailed coding of the first 2012 debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to test the relative influence of the can…
This study examines the dynamics of the framing of mass shooting incidences in the U.S. occurring in the traditional commercial online news media and Twitter. We demonstrate that there is a dynamic, reciprocal relationship between the attention paid to different aspects of mass shootings in online news and in Twitter: tweets tend to be responsive to traditional media reporting, but traditional …
Most electronic behavior traces available to social scientists offer a site-centric view of behavior. We argue that to understand patterns of interpersonal communication and media consumption, a more person-centric view is needed. The ideal research platform would capture reading as well as writing and friending, behavior across multiple sites, and demographic and psychographic variables. It wo…
Theorists have long predicted that like-minded individuals will tend to use social media to self-segregate into enclaves and that this tendency toward homophily will increase over time. Many studies have found moment-in-time evidence of network homophily, but very few have been able to directly measure longitudinal changes in the diversity of social media users’ habits. This is due in part to a…
This article explores the relative influence of individual and network-level effects on the emergence of online social relationships. Using network modeling and data drawn from logs of social behavior inside the virtual world Second Life, we combine individual- and network-level theories into an integrated model of online social relationship formation. Results reveal that time spent online and …
Twitter provides a direct method for political actors to connect with citizens, and for those citizens to organize into online clusters through their use of hashtags (i.e., a word or phrase marked with # to identify an idea or topic and facilitate a search for it). We examine the political alignments and networking of Twitter users, analyzing 9 million tweets produced by more than 23,000 random…