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Defining racial and ethnic context with geolocation data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2020

Ryan T. Moore Open the ORCID record for Ryan T. Moore [Opens in a new window]  and
Andrew Reeves
Ryan T. Moore*
Affiliation:
Department of Government, American University, Kerwin Hall 226, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20016-8130, USA
Andrew Reeves
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, Campus Box 1063, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: rtm@american.edu
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Abstract

Across disciplines, scholars strive to better understand individuals’ milieus—the people, places, and institutions individuals encounter in their daily lives. In particular, political scientists argue that racial and ethnic context shapes attitudes about candidates, policies, and fellow citizens. Yet, the current standard of measuring milieus is to place survey respondents in a geographic container and then to ascribe all that container's characteristics to the individual's milieu. Using a new dataset of over 2.6 million GPS records from over 400 individuals, we compare conventional static measures of racial and ethnic context to dynamic, precise measures of milieus. We demonstrate how low-level static measures tend to overstate how extreme individuals’ racial and ethnic contexts are and offer suggestions for future researchers.

Keywords

contextdata collectionmeasurementspatial methods

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Type
Research Note
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , October 2020 , pp. 780 - 794
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2020

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Supplementary material: Link

Moore and Reeves Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/G3YJXY
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Moore and Reeves supplementary material

Moore and Reeves supplementary material

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