Discuss your results looking at Black-White and Hispanic-White segregation at two time periods

Measure racial/ethnic segregation in the county you have been working with for previous assignments.

You will look at segregation in 2000 and 2010 using census tracts as the neighborhood unit and the county overall as the reference area.

Data

Data for year 2000
Select all tracts within your county (Geography -> Tract -> State -> County)
Use DEC Summary File 1 survey
Use Table P008: HISPANIC OR LATINO BY RACE
Tract labels need to be on the rows and counts by race and ethnicity in the columns
Customize Table -> Download (NOT EXCEL!) -> Download
2010
Follow the same steps but use Table P5: HISPANIC OR LATINO ORIGIN BY RACE
Segregation Analysis

Calculate the dissimilarity index for your county for both of the following pairs of groups:

Non-Hispanic White and Non-Hispanic Black population
Non-Hispanic White and Hispanic population
You will have four total dissimilarity index numbers at the end of this problem set; one for each of these comparisons in 2000 and 2010.
Formula:
D=12∗∑j=1J|xjX−yjY|
Where xj is the minority population in area j (e.g., tract), yj is the reference group population in area j, X is the total population of the minority group in the region (e.g., county), and Y is the total population of the reference area in the region. Essentially, the formula looks at the degree to which each neighborhood is dissimilar in the representation of the two groups relative to representation in the entire region.

If you’re having trouble with figuring out what formulas to put in your spreadsheet, use the example from lecture to help you out (in your case the “neighborhoods” are tracts and the “city” is your chosen county, since that’s the scale of the dissimilarity index you’ll be generating).

You must also include a table showing the number and percentage of the total population for each group of these three groups in each decade in your memo. I will grade on the formatting of this table, including using an appropriate number of decimals, correctly aligning text and numbers, properly labeling columns, and captioning the table.

Memo requirements:

Include a title that includes your county
Introduce the objective of the activity
Describe the dissimilarity index in plain language – what does it measure?
Discuss your results looking at Black-White and Hispanic-White segregation at two time periods

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