Poverty, Race, and Inequality Program

Introduction

In the program on Race, Poverty, and Inequality, IPR researchers look at various causes of poverty, racism, and inequality and their consequences, including continuation of an influential research line on the effects of public housing and residential policies on child and adult outcomes. Their examinations often overlap with other IPR research programs, in particular Child, Adolescent, and Family Studies and Urban Policy and Community Development.

Overview of Activities

Spillover Effects of Incarceration

Traci Burch shares data from her original study on the spillover effects of mass incarceration for voter turnout rates.

Of all voting-age citizens in the United States, 13 percent of black men and 6 percent of Latinos are unable to vote due to felon disenfranchise-ment laws. New research by political scientist and IPR associate Traci Burch is uncovering additional “spillover” effects of incarceration for voting in prisoners’ home neighborhoods. Burch matched neighborhoods in Charlotte, N.C., and Atlanta in the 2008 election and compared those where at least one resident was sent to prison before the election versus after.

Her preliminary analyses suggest that imprisoning neighborhood residents has at least some impact on voter turnout. In some cases, one incarceration can lead to the loss of as many as 11 votes in the community. One important implication is that the quality of democracy suffers in such cases because politicians tend to look where the votes are, possibly ignoring neighborhoods where large numbers of residents are moving in and out of prison.

How Housing Matters for Families and Children
With a major grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, IPR social psychologist Thomas D. Cook is leading an interdisciplinary team of social scientists in carrying out a longitudinal study of how housing matters for families and children. The new housing and families network is comprised of some of the nation’s top researchers in housing, poverty, and child development, including Harold Washington Professor Mary Pattillo, a professor of sociology and African American studies and IPR associate. Over the next three years, the researchers will conduct a random-assignment study of 4,000 voucher-eligible families in three to four U.S. cities with housing voucher lotteries. In particular, they will observe housing effects on children from birth until age 8 and try to understand questions left unanswered in previous housing studies. For example, why do some families who receive vouchers use them to resettle in blighted neighborhoods that mirror those they left? Why is racial composition more important than income distribution when selecting a neighborhood to live in?

This new study will take a much broader, multidisciplinary approach. Pulling together theoretical perspectives from a variety of disciplines—including statistics, sociology, economics, urban studies, education, and child development—the group will use will use both quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate how housing and the surrounding social, institutional, and family environment can affect children’s health, education, behavior, and life outcomes. Cook is Joan and Sarepta Harrison Chair in Ethics and Justice.

Race, Class, and “Choice” Policies
“Choice” has become a buzz word across the policy spectrum, especially in debates about housing, schools, and healthcare. In ongoing work, Pattillo questions the assumptions, ideology, and philosophy that undergirds choice in the policy arena and presents data from two small qualitative studies—one on parents choosing high schools for their children and the other on individuals using a Housing Choice Voucher (formerly called a Section 8) to search for an apartment. Preliminary results suggest that many on the receiving end of these policies are not even aware they have a choice and that there are socioeconomic differences in who chooses. In addition, these studies reveal a misalignment between what policymakers and the targets of these policies deem important.

Social Mobility in the United States and Europe
From colonial times to the present, Americans have persisted in their vision of the United States as the land of opportunity—offering extraordinary opportunities for geographic, occupational, and financial mobility, both within and across generations. In a new study, economist and IPR associate Joseph Ferrie assesses the empirical basis for this belief in American exceptionalism. He uses historical census data on individuals and families in the United States from 1850 to 1930 to compare their mobility experiences both with their contemporaries in Europe and with Americans later in the 20th century.

These comparisons reveal that, in the past, the United States was indeed unique in its high levels of social mobility, as compared with the industrial economies of Great Britain and France. However, U.S. mobility has fallen sharply since the 19th century, consistent with a decline in the U.S. advantage in education and a decline in the returns to internal migration—as city and regional growth rates have converged. Based on previous work, Ferrie also concludes that Americans’ lingering perceptions of mobility might account for their unique policy preferences—in particular, their tolerance for high levels of inequality and lack of support for taxation and government redistribution programs.

	Taylor Dark presents Anthony Chen with the American Political Science Association's Gladys M. Kammerer award for his book The Fifth Freedom.

Affirmative Action in College Admissions
IPR sociologist Anthony Chen takes an interdisciplinary approach to examining the history and development of affirmative action and policies in America. Chen’s newest book project, with Lisa Stulberg of New York University, looks at the origins of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. In contrast to others—most of whom focus on the role of the courts—Chen and Stulberg place institutions of higher education at the center of their analysis. Based on archival research at more than a dozen schools, Chen and his colleague find that affirmative action actually arose in two waves. Inspired by nonviolent, civil rights protests in the South, administrators at Northern schools launched a first wave in the early 1960s. A second wave emerged in the late 1960s, primarily as a response to campus-based student protests in the North. These findings underscore the combined importance of collective mobilization, elite perceptions, and status-group struggle in understanding patterns of institutional change in higher education.

Chen’s previous book, The Fifth Freedom: Jobs, Politics, and Civil Rights in the United States, 1941–1972 (Princeton University Press, 2009), garnered three book awards in 2010 from the American Political Science Association (see p. 60). It chronicles the forgotten origins of affirmative action, tracing the advent of such policies to the partisan politics of “fair employment practices” in the 1940s and 1950s.

Social Class and the College Experience
Social psychologists Jennifer Richeson and Eli Finkel have recently completed four studies that add to the literature on social stigma and its harmful effects on an individual’s cognitive resources. Working with former IPR postdoctoral fellow Sarah Johnson, currently at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the researchers observe that coming from a relatively lower-income background produces identity-based concerns about academic competency for students at an elite, private university. In turn, lower-income students experience self-regulatory depletion as a result of managing these concerns.

This work presents several unique contributions to theories underlying stigma and social group threat. First, it supports the theory that burdens of stigma are truly context-based: many participants who expressed sensitivity about their socioeconomic status actually hailed from middle-class families and—before entering the elite university setting—had not previously experienced class- or income-based feelings of anxiety. Second, it shows that these concerns are not dependent on an outwardly visible group identity, such as one’s racial group membership. Instead, the process of managing a stigmatized identity—even one that is virtually invisible to one’s peers—can be, in and of itself, a source of cognitive depletion.

Furthermore, the research findings carry practical implications for the use of higher education as a social equalizer. If class-based stigma serves as a perpetual drain on self-regulatory resources, then students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds attending elite colleges and universities will regularly have fewer cognitive resources available to contend with the various other challenges of college life, from class assignments to personal relationships. Richeson is Weinberg College Board of Visitors Research and Teaching Professor and an IPR fellow. Finkel is an associate professor of psychology and IPR associate. Their research appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Refugees’ Networks and Job Prospects

Lori Beaman (back center) meets with women in a farming village in Mali.

IPR economist Lori Beaman is using theoretical and empirical tools to examine the implications of social networks on labor market outcomes for a group of refugees resettled in the United States between 2001 and 2005. What matters, she finds, is not only the number of people in a person’s network, but also the extent of their experience in the U.S. labor market. The chances of employment and higher pay increase notably among recent arrivals who have connections to more tenured members of the U.S. labor force. On the other hand, a large influx of new immigrants can damage the utility of the network as a whole.

With an IPR seed grant, Beaman is extending her work on network dynamics with Andrew Dillon of the International Food Policy Research Institute. The researchers are using an experimental design to map the spread of agricultural knowledge through farmers’ social networks in the West African nation of Mali. Farmers in randomly selected villages will receive calendars with information on compost practices for crops common in their area. Beaman and Dillon will then track diffusion of the calendars throughout neighboring villages and conduct follow-up interviews to see how well farmers spread the information.

Local Wages, Internet Access, and Policy
Subsidizing broadband access in the rural United States has often been touted as a policy solution to jump-starting economic activity in these areas; however, research by management and strategy professor Shane Greenstein, an IPR associate, with Chris Forman and Avi Goldfarb suggests otherwise. The three researchers looked at the relationship between advanced commercial Internet use and variation in local wage growth in the United States between 1995 and 2000. They find that advanced Internet business use such as e-commerce is associated with wage growth—but only as a one-time relative gain and only in more urban locations already in the top 25 percent of income that are also well-off in terms of education and industries. While some recent studies suggest that Internet use might lower the costs of operating a business in rural areas, they could not find any proof that wages in these areas gained as a result—or that the Internet has helped rural areas to develop much at all. Instead, their results point to a large gap in advanced Internet use between urban and rural areas.

Thus, the researchers suggest that policymakers focus on tailored regional development instead of encouraging Internet business use outside of urban areas. Greenstein is Elinor and H. Wendell Hobbs Professor of Management and Strategy in the Kellogg School of Management. Forman is at the Georgia Institute of  Technology, and Goldfarb is at the University of  Toronto. The study is forthcoming
in the American Economic Review.

Changing Race and Class Dynamics
IPR anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo is currently working on a book manuscript titled “The View from Cavallaro’s,” in which she provides a cross-class, cross-race, feminist historical ethnography of political economy and public culture in New Haven, Conn. Through decades of fieldwork, di Leonardo has mapped the public/media consciousness of the city and its residents—especially varied and changing visions of political-economic shifts and their effects on New Haveners’ quality of life.

Minority and Mainstream Media
Despite the overwhelming press and scholarly attention to President Obama’s racial identity, mainstream media coverage of the 2008 campaign rarely reported on the actual apprehensions of African American voters—or the far-reaching commentary and powerful organizing efforts of black media. Working to fill this gap, di Leonardo has been studying the political influence and listenership of the top syndicated black radio show, the Tom Joyner Morning Show (TJMS). The weekday, drive-time show features music, humor, and news as well as political commentary and is a key go-to site for Democratic politicians. It is broadcast on 105 black radio stations and boasts 8 million airwave and online listeners nationwide.

Yet di Leonardo finds that TJMS receives much less coverage than many white conservative talk shows with much smaller audiences. The New York Times, for example, has covered Howard Stern, Don Imus, and Rush Limbaugh (before his television show) in hundreds of stories each, but has mentioned TJMS a scant 17 times in the show’s entire 16-year history. She is investigating various causes for the show’s “hidden-in-plain-sight” status, including its heavy corporate sponsorship—contradicting typical notions of “progressive” media—and its appeal to a middle-aged, working-class audience—as opposed to more “ghettoized” or “glamorized” depictions of African American life. This research is part of a larger project exploring the changing worlds of American minority media outlets and their connections to more mainstream media.

Biases in Risk Perception
With Devah Pager of Princeton University, IPR sociologist Lincoln Quillian has completed a study of how social factors influence people’s perceptions about their chances of experiencing a hazardous event. Their most recent work focuses on race and biases in perceptions of the risk of criminal victimization.

Quillian and Pager examine how perceptions of the risk of becoming a victim of a burglary or robbery compare with actual victimization rates by layering data from the Survey of Economic Expectations and census zip code information from 1994 to 2002. They find more people believe they will become crime victims than is borne by victimization rates. Their results also show that neighborhood racial composition is strongly associated with perceived risk of victimization among white respondents, although neighborhood socioeconomic status drives the risk of actual victimization. Results of the study were published in Social Psychology Quarterly.

Interracial Relations, Prejudice, and Negative Stereotypes
In Northwestern’s Social Perception & Communication Laboratory, Richeson leads a team of researchers in exploring how concerns about either being or appearing racially biased influence subtle aspects of cognition, emotion, and behavior. They use state-of-the-art tools such as brain scans with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in addition to standard psychological tools and practices, to examine the experiences of racial minorities and members of other low-status groups as they attempt to persist—and even succeed—in the face of low numbers and negative group stereotypes.

Improving Diversity Science
In Psychological Inquiry, Richeson and graduate student Destiny Peery urge researchers to take into account both beliefs on color blindness inherent in the law and recent research on “color consciousness” in social psychology to improve scientific study of diversity. Given the law’s historical precedent in creating racial categories based on constructs such as the “one-drop rule,” in which one drop of nonwhite blood makes the person nonwhite, they concur that researchers must consider social categories in their particular sociocultural, historical, and legal frameworks.

However, Richeson and Peery also point out that researchers need to understand emerging social science evidence on the psychological effects of the colorblind ideology. Some studies, including those by Richeson’s lab, reveal that instead of eliminating racial discrimination, colorblindness can serve to increase racial bias for dominant groups, i.e., whites. They cite similar findings from other studies, including one by law scholar and IPR associate Lee Epstein and her colleagues on the importance of considering gender in judicial decision making. Epstein is Henry Wade Rogers Professor in the School of Law.