Farley, Krysan, & Couper study role of race in neighborhood preferences

Q&A: Probing role of race in housing choices by Dave Gershman | The Ann Arbor News Saturday December 06, 2008, 11:56 PM A new University of Michigan study examined how race comes into play when people are making decisions about which neighborhoods to live in.

A randomly selected group of 600 white adults aged 21 and older in the Detroit and Chicago areas were shown videos of various neighborhoods with actors of different races posing as residents performing everyday tasks, such as picking up the mail or talking to neighbors.

The News spoke with Reynolds Farley, research professor emeritus at the U-M Institute of Social Research, who co-authored the study with U-M colleague Mick Couper, a senior research scientist, and Maria Krysan, a sociologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Q: What is the study's central conclusion?

FarleyA: When people look at neighborhoods as places to live they're influenced not only by the quality of the homes they see but also by the race of the people who live in that area. Q: Were you surprised?

A: No, I was not surprised by that conclusion. However, there has been a debate among academics about whether whites respond to anything other than the quality of the homes.

Q: How does this study then inform that debate?

A: This study informs that debate since it shows if you control for the quality of the homes and the ambiance of the neighborhood, whites tend to rank neighborhoods with white residents significantly more positively than they rank identical neighborhoods with black residents.

Q: What does this say about the state of race relations today?

A: I think that race is still significant to many whites and to many blacks when people consider neighborhoods. The race of who lives there influences their judgments about whether that might be an excellent place to live, a good place to live or a bad place to live.

Q: What is the state of residential segregation?

A: We've seen decreases in racial segregation since 1970. But the decreases have been very, very small and some people wonder why is there such low progress being made in integrating neighborhoods in the United States.

Q: Does the study point the way to a solution?

A: There are changing racial attitudes. We studied those to a limited degree. That is, younger individuals have more tolerant attitudes to racial issues than older individuals. ... Those kinds of changes, I think, are going to gradually lead to more residential integration. But in the area of the Midwest it's going to be a very slow process.

Q: Why is the pace so slow in the Midwest?

A: For one thing, there's a very slow rate of population growth in the most of the Midwest. And new housing tends to be more racially integrated. Older neighborhoods typically have reputations and very often the reputation has a racial connection to it.

Q: How did you conduct the study?

A: This was part of the Detroit Area Study that the University of Michigan has conducted since 1952. Every spring there's a random selection of households in the Detroit metropolitan area and different social topics are explored by interviewing a random selection of adults.

Q: Can you talk about the use of video in this project?

A: This study was innovative in that we showed people a short video clip of about 35 seconds. Some people saw the neighborhood with white residents. Some saw it with black residents. Some saw the same video clip with both black and white residents. Furthermore the respondents answered on their own laptop. ... We hoped to minimize the interviewer effect. We hoped to get the true feeling of the respondent.

Q: You didn't ask the participants to focus on race in evaluating the neighborhoods?

A: We did not tell them the focus was on race. We thought people would immediately be influenced by race if we told them that this was a study about whether they would be willing to live in black neighborhoods or mixed neighborhoods. We thought that would influence how they judged the videos they saw.

Q: Did you have any information on the backgrounds of the participants, such as whether they live in homogenous or mixed neighborhoods?

A: Yes, we did but there's a high degree of racial residential segregation in Detroit, so there are not many whites who lived in mixed neighborhoods.

Reporter Dave Gershman can be reached at 734-994-6818 or dgershman@annarbornews.com .