Reflections on the Dimensions of Segregation.

Nancy Denton and I published " The Dimensions of Residential Segregation " in 1988, during the early phases of a multiyear project funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The purpose of the project was to study the trends, patterns, causes, and consequences of racial and ethnic residential segregation the United States. Nancy was a postdoctoral research associate on the study at the time we began our investigation. In starting out, we encountered a vigorous debate in the literature about the " correct " or " right " way to measure neighborhood segregation that left us unsure about how to proceed methodologically. Prior to the mid-1970s, however, the measurement of segregation had been settled science. In 1955, Otis Dudley Duncan and Beverly Duncan published an article in the American Sociological Review entitled " A Methodological Analysis of Segregation Indices, " in which they examined a variety of proposed measures. They concluded that the best overall measure was the Index of Dissimilarity (D), given its ease of computation, well-known and tractable properties, clear interpretation and invariance with respect to the relative number of minority group members. Over the ensuing two decades, a Pax Duncana ensued and D was widely used without debate as the standard measure of segregation. It comprised the main index for such classic works as Duncan and Duncan's (1957) The Negro Population of Chicago, Taeuber and Taeuber's (1965) Negroes in Cities, and Grebler et al.'s (1970) The Mexican-American People. The Pax Duncana ended in 1976 with the publication of a critique by Cortese et al. entitled " Further Considerations on the Methodological Analysis of Segregation, " also published in the American Sociological Review. The article unleashed " a torrent of papers [that] considered a variety of definitions of segregation , proposed a host of new measures, and rediscovered several old indices " (Massey and Denton 1988:282). By the mid-1980s no consensus had been reached on how best to measure segregation and we uncovered some 20 different measures of the concept in our review of the literature. Before proceeding to the substance of our analysis, we decided we had to bring some order to the debate and so undertook a systematic analysis of segregation indices, resulting in the Social Forces paper.