Acting Assistant Professor Christine Leibbrand published a story in The Conversation, “What happens when black Americans leave their segregated hometowns?” In it, Leibbrand discusses results from a study that she, Chris Hess (PhD 2019, now postdoc at Rutgers), Ryan Gabriel (PhD 2016, now Assistant Professor at BYU), and Professor Kyle Crowder recently published in Social Science Research about the effects moving out of a segregated neighborhood and into a new metro area has on outcomes later in life. The findings of the study shed light on potential ways to mitigate racial disparities that ethnic minorities experience early in life.
“First, we looked at those who grew up in segregated metropolitan areas and stayed in those same areas as adults. They ended up living in more impoverished, racially isolated, lower-income neighborhoods in their adulthood, compared to children who grew up in less segregated metro areas. However, when we turned our attention to individuals who moved out of the metro areas they grew up in, into new cities or states, we found a profoundly different set of relationships.”
This same collaboration between Leibbrand, Hess, Gabriel, and Crowder also resulted in a recent article in Demography about of hypersegregation and its effect on socioeconomic disparities between black and white Americans.