Segregation Indices

Segregation Indices

Residential segregation has been a prominent topic in sociology since Burgess (1928) published his landmark study more than seventy years ago, and for almost as long, sociologists have argued about how to measure it. The debate has ebbed and flowed, and for a time the issue seemed to have been settled. In 1955, Duncan and Duncan published a landmark article (Duncan and Duncan 1955) demonstrating that there was little information in any of the prevailing indices that had not been captured already by the index of dissimilarity. For twenty years afterward, that measure was employed as the standard index of residential segregation.

This Pax Duncanae came to an abrupt end in 1976 with the publication of a critique of the dissimilarity index by Cortese and colleagues, ushering in a period of debate that has not ended (Cortese et al. 1976). Over the ensuing decade, a variety of old indices were reintroduced and new ones were invented, yielding a multiplicity of candidates. In an effort to bring some order to the field, Massey and Denton (1988) undertook a systematic analysis of twenty segregation indices they had identified from a review of the literature. They argued that segregation is not a unidimensional construct but encompasses five distinct dimensions of spatial variation.

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