Abstract:In this article, we build on Gaddis (2017a) by illuminating a key variable plausibly related to racial perceptions of last names-geography. We show that the probability that any individual belongs to a race is conditional not only on their last name but also on surrounding racial demographics. Specifically, we demonstrate that the probability of a name denoting a race varies considerably across contexts, and this is more of a problem for some names than others. This result has two important implications for audit study research: it suggests important limitations for (1) the generalizability of audit study findings and (2) for the interpretation of geography-based conditional effects. This means that researchers should be careful to select names that consistently signal racial groups regardless of local demographics. We provide a slim R package that can help researchers do this.
Some populations are difficult to survey. This poses a problem for researchers who want to understand what issues matter to these populations and how the salience of those concerns varies over time. In this visualization article, the authors illustrate how Google Trends can be used to examine issue salience for hard-to-survey mass populations. Applying this method to immigrant concerns over deportation, the authors show that anxieties over removal increased in response to (potential) policy changes, such as Arizona’s Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (Senate Bill 1070) and the immigration policies that were considered in the wake of Donald Trump’s election.
Immigrants are known to have high expectations to matriculate into college and achieve a college degree. Yet the majority of the studies that examine the educational expectations of immigrant youth focus only on one country. Furthermore, researchers have not yet examined whether the high educational expectations of immigrants are promoted or hampered by the characteristics of educational systems in immigrants’ host countries. This paper examines the relationship between one such feature, tracking, and the educational expectations of immigrant youth in Europe. It shows that cross-nationally, immigrant students have higher educational expectations than nonimmigrant youth. However, for first-generation immigrants, this advantage is not as pronounced in tracked systems as compared with nontracked systems. This suggests that immigrants and nonimmigrants respond differently to the educational contexts that they encounter and that certain features of educational systems can stymie immigrant advancement.
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