Title: When Does Neighborhood Poverty Matter?  Using Large-Scale Data to Understand Heterogeneity

Speaker: Mario Small, Harvard University

Description: Research across the social sciences has demonstrated repeatedly that neighborhoods matter.  At this juncture, the question is how—a question that requires examining where, when, for whom, and under what conditions neighborhoods matter.  I show that these questions are more tractable than even as little as 15 years ago, given the rapidly rising availability of large-scale administrative (“big”) data from public and private sources.  I present several results suggesting that, in the context of neighborhoods, race may matter more than class.

Mario Luis Small is former Dean of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago and currently Grafstein Family Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Small has published books and numerous articles on urban poverty, personal networks, and the relationship between qualitative and quantitative social science methods. His books include Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio (2004) and Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life (2009), both of which received the C. Wright Mills Award for Best Book, among other honors. Small is currently writing a book on the evolution of social support networks among graduate students and studying the formal and informal systems of support among low-income mothers in New York, Chicago, and Huston.