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Connecting the Dots: The Spatial Processes Underlying Place-Level Diversity Change in U.S. Metros Between 1990 and 2010

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Abstract

Entropy is a crucial measure used to describe expanding ethnoracial diversity in the United States in recent decades. However, this measure changes in complex ways contingent on the starting levels of diversity in a place and on the ethnoracial composition of that place. Careful examination of the behavior of Entropy indicates an uneven relationship between compositional shifts in population and shifts in Entropy. We note differences based on the majority population and a tendency for high diversity locations to become less diverse over time. Moreover, adjacent places tend to move together towards greater or lesser diversity with both metropolitan and sub-metropolitan processes leading to correlations in diversity change across decades. Using place level data from the 1990 and 2010 decennial Censuses we quantify these patterns of change and association with the goal of increasing knowledge of baseline conditions so that Entropy can be used with greater nuance in the future.

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Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Note Fitted lines convey y ~ x + x2 models. (Color figure online)

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Notes

  1. Eleven places in our sample were majority Native American. Although they reflect a very different process from the immigration driving diversity change in Hispanic and Asian majority places, the magnitude and significance of effect in our robustness checks using five categories instead of three indicate that grouping these three racial/ethnic communities together is nevertheless warranted.

  2. Our models here use change in Entropy as the dependent variable resulting in a very low Adjusted R2 due to the distribution of this variable. Throughout, we also ran comparable models based on predicting 2010 Entropy with the same sets of independent variables. These models had equivalent magnitudes and significances on the coefficients with much higher adjusted R2 (0.75 as opposed to 0.16 in the base models). We retain the models here because diversity change better represents the conceptual target of our analysis, but the robustness of our coefficients to the change in dependent variable gives us greater confidence in our interpretation.

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Acknowledgements

Funding was provided by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Grant Nos. R01HD074605 and R24HD041025).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology and Population Research Institute, The Pennsylvania State University, 211 Oswald Tower, University Park, PA, 16802, USA

    Michael J. R. Martin

  2. Department of Geography, The Pennsylvania State University, 321 Walker Building, University Park, PA, 16802, USA

    Christopher S. Fowler

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  1. Michael J. R. Martin
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  2. Christopher S. Fowler
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Correspondence to Michael J. R. Martin.

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Martin, M.J.R., Fowler, C.S. Connecting the Dots: The Spatial Processes Underlying Place-Level Diversity Change in U.S. Metros Between 1990 and 2010. Spat Demogr 6, 141–157 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40980-017-0038-8

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