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Racial and Ethnic Residential Segregation by Family Structure and the Presence of Children in Metropolitan America

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Abstract

Little research has examined the residential segregation of blacks, Hispanics, and Asians from whites disaggregated by family structure and the presence of children in metropolitan America. Using data from the 2010 Census and the 2006–2010 American Community Survey, we find that, net of controls, among blacks, single-mother families are significantly more segregated from whites than married couples, regardless of the presence of children. However, these same differences in segregation are not found among Hispanics and Asians. Among those groups, married families with children under 18 are more segregated from whites than married families without children under 18, suggesting that married Hispanics and Asians with children desire closer proximity to their co-ethnics. The results suggest that racial and ethnic segregation by family structure and the presence of children varies by the racial and ethnic group considered and is, therefore, important to understanding overall racial and ethnic segregation in metropolitan America.

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Notes

  1. Married-couple families refers to husband–wife families. Same-sex couples are not included in this count because they are classified as unmarried partners, even if the marriage was performed in a state issuing marriage certificates for same-sex couples.

  2. We present a parallel set of multivariate analyses in Appendix Table 7 that uses white married families with children under 18 as the reference group in all dissimilarity scores that are analyzed.

  3. The pattern of differences in results in Appendix Table 6 that uses white married families with children under 18 as the reference group in the dissimilarity scores is similar in nature to those presented in Table 1. The main difference is that the values of the dissimilarity scores are larger in Appendix Table 6, as we suspected. However, the magnitude of the differences is not very large, which is likely attributable to the fact that the analysis is based upon counts of families. If families include several children, they are counted only once in our analysis, in contrast to studies that use counts of children and adults (e.g., Owens, 2017).

  4. In contrast to the findings in Appendix Table 5, the descriptive results in Table 1 show that the only difference in segregation that is significant is the one between Hispanic families with and without related children under 18. The difference in results is likely due to the fact that in Table 1, the average segregation scores are calculated by weighting by the population size of the metropolitan areas.

  5. However, because we cannot disaggregate the category of “without related children under 18” into those with older children and those with no children, a limitation of our analysis is that we do not know what group might be responsible for the higher levels of residential segregation from Whites, relative to families with related children under 18.

  6. For the most part, the results in Appendix Table 7 that use White married families with children under 18 as the reference group in the dissimilarity scores are similar to those in Table 4.

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Appendix

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Table 5 Reduced Generalized Linear Regression Models of Residential Segregation by Race/Ethnicity, Family Structure, and Presence of Related Children

5,

Table 6 Weighted mean dissimilarity scores of racial and ethnic groups from white married families with children under 18 by the presence of related children and family structure, Metropolitan America, 2010

6 and

Table 7 Generalized linear regression models of residential segregation by race/ethnicity, family structure, and presence of related children

7.

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Friedman, S., Wynn, C.E. & Tsao, Hs. Racial and Ethnic Residential Segregation by Family Structure and the Presence of Children in Metropolitan America. Race Soc Probl 14, 170–188 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-021-09342-3

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