title: Capturing the two dimensions of residential segregation at the neighborhood level for health research.
abstract: Two conceptual and methodological foundations of segregation studies are that (i) segregation involves more than one group, and (ii) segregation measures need to quantify how different population groups are distributed across space. Therefore, percentage of population belonging to a group is not an appropriate measure of segregation because it does not describe how populations are spread across different areal units or neighborhoods. In principle, evenness and isolation are the two distinct dimensions of segregation that capture the spatial patterns of population groups. To portray people's daily environment more accurately, segregation measures need to account for the spatial relationships between areal units and to reflect the situations at the neighborhood scale. For these reasons, the use of local spatial entropy-based diversity index (SHi ) and local spatial isolation index (Si ) to capture the evenness and isolation dimensions of segregation, respectively, are preferable. However, these two local spatial segregation indexes have rarely been incorporated into health research. Rather ineffective and insufficient segregation measures have been used in previous studies. Hence, this paper empirically demonstrates how the two measures can reflect the two distinct dimensions of segregation at the neighborhood level, and argues conceptually and set the stage for their future use to effectively and meaningfully examine the relationships between residential segregation and health.
authors.affiliation: Division of Public Health Sciences, Department of Surgery, School of Medicine, Washington University in St. Louis , St. Louis, MO , USA ; Division of Epidemiology and Public Health, School of Medicine, University of Alcalá , Alcalá de Henares , Spain.
authors.forename: Masayoshi
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Oka
authors.affiliation: Department of Geography and GeoInformation Science, College of Science, George Mason University , Fairfax, VA , USA ; Department of Geography, University of Hong Kong , Pokfulam , Hong Kong.
authors.forename: David W S
authors.initials: DW
authors.lastname: Wong
keywords: local spatial entropy-based diversity index; local spatial isolation index; racial/ethnicity segregation; residential segregation; socioeconomic segregation