Abstract
This paper develops a set of empirical social indicators of quality between races, sexes, and spatial areas in all U.S. SMSA's. New findings are presented concerning the level of equality by city and region. An eight-step Guttman Scale is developed which suggests a progressive hierarchy of these various of equality. Cities develop higher levels of equality between residents in a patterned building block manner beginning first with favorable levels of spatial equality and culminating in equality between black and white professional employment rates. Finally, a canonical correlation model is hypothesized and empirically estimated to explain variation between these 243 cities in level of inequality. This model linked key economic, demographic and ecological forces to levels of equality in spatial systems.
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USDA Project NE-89 and the University of South Carolina Faculty Productive Scholarship Council supported this research. Jon McLeod and Homer R. Steedly assisted in the data collection. Terry Nochols Clark provided helpful comments.
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Foley, J.W. Toward macro-social accounting: Measures and scales of racial, sexual, and spatial equality in 243 U.S. SMSA's. Soc Indic Res 6, 445–461 (1979). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00289438
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00289438