(Mis)Perceiving the Metropolis: The Correlates and Consequences of Imperfect Neighborhood Knowledge
My research agenda seeks to understand the role of neighborhood knowledge in creating and perpetuating spatial patterns of inequality. By focusing on how individuals make sense of – and decisions about – their local environments, my work examines the ways in which imperfect information, perceptions, place reputations, demographic change, and public policy combine to shape where and how we live.
In three chapters, my dissertation—which received a 2022 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award Honorable Mention—explored the nature and prevalence of three distinct dimensions of imperfect knowledge and their consequences for neighborhood dynamics:
The first chapter focused on residents’ perceptions of neighborhood composition. It offers quantitative evidence that individuals’ perceptions of local demographic composition are both at odds with census measures and systematically biased. I find that across ethnoracial groups, the average gap between perceived and objective group size is 15 percentage points and that residents are significantly more likely to overstate the proportion of their own-race neighbors. These misperceptions emphasize one’s compatibility with their surroundings and likely minimize cognitive dissonance between one’s preferred and achieved neighborhoods. I argue that these findings expose the importance of incorporating perceptual bias into neighborhood research, especially for studies that link decision-making with objective neighborhood conditions.
This paper was awarded the 2022 Katherine Luke Best Student Paper Award, University of Michigan Department of Sociology
The second chapter examined perceptions of neighborhood change, documenting the degree to which residents’ perceptions of change in local safety are sensitive to personal experience, neighborhood attributes, and actual neighborhood crime trends. My findings highlight residents’ error-prone perceptions of change, demonstrating that these perceptions are especially sensitive to one’s recent experience as a crime victim and neighborhood demographics. Based on these findings, I argue that research on neighborhood change processes need to more clearly establish what I call the first link in the causal chain of neighborhood dynamics: that residents recognize change when it happens.
The final chapter examined neighborhood reputations—the sentiments and identities collectively ascribed to neighborhoods to draw similarities and contrasts between places. In it, I build upon the emerging literature on place reputations by empirically validating reputation as a collectively produced, ecometric property of neighborhoods. While this work shows that neighborhood reputations are generally agreed upon across populations, I also show that reputation is only tangentially related to the demographic, socio-economic, and physical realities of place.
A unifying goal of these chapters is to offer a more realistic representation of how people construct and use neighborhood knowledge. Taken together, these chapters advance my argument that widespread misbelief about neighborhoods functions as a key mechanism shaping processes of neighborhood choice and neighborhood change that lead to or reinforce patterns of residential segregation.