Example

Big Concept/Proposition: Residential concentration is a crucial factor in the reproduction of racial and ethnic inequality in the contemporary United States.

Operational Logic: One way to explore this proposition is to specify a set of “correspondence” hypotheses as you did in the GIS unit on England. In this case, however, you would explore the association between racial and/or ethnic concentration on the one hand, and various negative social outcomes, on the other.

In the first instance, you would have to establish and describe concentration, using variables like pblack, phisp, pnonwhit, or various recodes and/or combinations of them (review Lab 1). Then you would have to find out whether or not such concentration is connected to negative social outcomes such as low median education, low median income, low rates of homeownership, high poverty rates and so forth, using variables like meaned (recode from Lab 2), mdfam_in, povpc, tot_rhu, tot_ohu etc.

To perform the analysis, you need to recode the continuous variables into variables with a smaller number of usable categories in the same way you did in Lab 2. You will also need to convert counts into percentages, where required for comparison. Warning: Recoding takes time! Good news: you can share recodes!

Other ideas

Big Concept/Proposition	Hints for Operational Logic
Residential concentration is higher among African-Americans than Hispanics in MA. Non-white Hispanics are the most concentrated group of all.	You will need to think carefully about how the race and ethnicity variables can be used together (pblack, phisp) to identify tracts with both high Hispanic and high African-American populations (you might need to think about 3-way tables). Then you need to think about how you will describe/measure concentration. There are several options. Review Lab 1.
Minority members tend to move out of poorer and more segregated tracts if they can i.e., if they can afford to. This idea is supported by a large literature in immigrant communities in the United States where the pattern has been describes as “up and out”. Is this an accurate description of all minority communities?	If this is true, we would expect there to be the same range of social outcomes such as home ownership, levels of education etc. in minority and non-minority tracts with similar incomes because those that could afford to leave have left, regardless of race. To the extent that wealthier minority tracts display the same kind of negative social indicators as less wealthy minority tracts, this is evidence of segregation. If the range of social outcomes is higher in minority tracts, this provides some evidence that concentration is not voluntary but rather is involuntary segregation.
More recent social arrivals, e.g., immigrants are more likely to live in more racially/ethnically concentrated communities than community members of long-standing.	Look at the Boston Renaissance to discover what groups arrived in MA the most recently.
Social instability is an intervening factor between racial/ethnic concentration and negative social outcomes.	Think about measuring social stability by levels of homeownership, renting, and the value of rents. Think about how you might analyze the idea of an intervening factor. (You might need to think about a 3-way table here).