Suburban Social Contacts and Changing Demographic Balances

Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

The United States is becoming an increasingly multi-ethnic society. This demographic reconfiguration is expected to have widespread impacts. The research supported by this award will investigate one of these impacts: how the increasing residential proximity of different ethnic groups living in the same neighborhoods affects their social interactions. Investigating this question is complicated by another well-established social trend: decreasing interactions within and between all social groups, not just across ethnic lines. Therefore, the overarching research question is, "What does the increase in racial and ethnic diversity in national residential patterns mean as residential social ties among all neighbors, not only across race or ethnicity, become weaker?" The research is important because neighborhood social cohesion affects both community security and quality of life. Findings from this research will help social scientists, policy makers, and city planners to better understand what supports healthy neighborhoods during periods of widespread social change. The research will be carried out in a suburban community near Chicago. The researcher chose this site because it is an established, mixed Latino and non-Latino, middle-class neighborhood, where similarities of class and experience could be expected to facilitate inter-ethnic contacts, if other factors, such as ethnic sorting and decreasing sociality, were not also at work. Data will be collected through a combination of social science methods, including household surveys of a stratified sample of 128 households, 64 structured interviews, archival research, and on-going participant observation. The surveys and interviews will be applied to an equal number of Latino and non-Latino households. Two adult respondents will be surveyed and interviewed in every household whenever possible with the aim to also detect gender-related variations. Findings from the research will contribute to remaking overly monolithic analytical categories such as class, race, and ethnicity. The research also will contribute to improving the quality of life in America's neighborhoods. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.