Abstract
Many studies have reported increasing equality in occupation and income attainments for employed white and African-American men in the United States since 1940 (e.g., Siegel 1967; Johnson and Sell 1978; Fossett, Galle, and Kelly 1986; Farley 1985; National Research Council 1989; Farley and Allen 1987; Smith and Welch 1984, 1986).2 One should view these findings cautiously, however, because most of the studies confined their analyses to aggregate outcomes. Recent research suggests that national-level analyses of employed men may lead to overly optimistic conclusions about trends in racial differences in labor force outcomes. Indeed, increased racial equality of labor force outcomes in the United States is likely to be more modest or even nonexistent: (a) when racial comparisons are of employment and amount of labor force participation instead of occupation and income and (b) when the data represent lower levels of aggregation than the nation as a whole.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Southern Demographic Meetings, Charlestion, South Carolina, October 1992. The data analyzed in this study were assembled in part with funding provided by the Race and Ethnic Studies Institute at Texas A&M University.
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Fossett, M.A., Seibert, M.T., Cready, C.M. (1998). Ecological and Structural Determinants of Declining Labor Force Participation of African-American Men. In: Micklin, M., Poston, D.L. (eds) Continuities in Sociological Human Ecology. The Springer Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9841-8_17
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