Abstract
This chapter links individual- and household-level data from the nationally representative Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) with neighborhood-level environmental hazard data derived from the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) in order to determine whether regional differences in environmental inequality exist at the household level. The data cover nearly every metropolitan area in the contiguous US from 1990 to 2005, we divide the contiguous US into nine regions, and we use Geographic Information System (GIS) software to weight the potential impact of each TRI facility inversely according to geographic distance. Results indicate that the existence and magnitude of environmental racial inequality, as well as the role that race, income and other household characteristics play in shaping this inequality, vary in important ways across the nine regions of the country. This has important implications for environmental inequality and public health research.
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Notes
- 1.
In this study, the average number of grid cells per tract is 54 with a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 1,176. Since researchers have not developed a commonly accepted distance decay weighting scheme, we have experimented with alternative distance decay functions to estimate proximity to industrial hazards. In doing this, we have altered not only the equations, but also the size of the grid-cells and the distance at which industrial sites are no longer considered influential (the threshold distance at which the distance decay weights reach zero). However, in prior research, altering the distance decay model in these ways has had only minor substantive impact on our results (see Crowder and Downey, 2010).
- 2.
Residential mobility researchers also routinely employ variables such as marital status, the presence of children in the family, home ownership, and household crowding. However, we do not include these controls in our models because they are predictors of the decision to move rather than of residential location.
- 3.
A small, but statistically influential, number of Hispanic respondents in the East North Central region lived in a single tract with extremely high pollution proximity values (in our sample, very few census tracts have multiple respondents during any single year). Thus, to avoid biasing the results for this region, we restricted the region’s observations to respondents living in neighborhoods with pollution proximity scores of less than 1,000. Restricting the data in this way greatly reduces the gross Hispanic pollution proximity value for the region, while reducing the proximity values for blacks and whites in the region only slightly. As a result, these findings and the regression results reported below may underestimate the Hispanic/black and Hispanic/white pollution gap in the East North Central region.
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Acknowledgments
Direct all correspondence to Liam Downey, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado, 219 Ketchum Hall, UCB 327, Boulder, CO 80309. 303-492-8626 (Liam.Downey@colorado.edu). This research was supported by a development grant to the first author from the NICHD funded University of Colorado Population Center, and grants to the second author (R21 HD049610) and to both authors (R21 HD058708) from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
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Downey, L., Crowder, K. (2011). Using Distance Decay Techniques and Household-Level Data to Explore Regional Variation in Environmental Inequality. In: Maantay, J., McLafferty, S. (eds) Geospatial Analysis of Environmental Health. Geotechnologies and the Environment, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0329-2_19
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