carter-hanford / class-analysis-2018

an empirical study on the influence of social class/race on socioeconomic status in an urban setting

An Empirical Study of Social Class and Race in Urban Spaces and their Relationship to Socioeconomic Status

Introduction

This is the repository for my undergrad capstone project at Saint Louis University for the B.A. in Sociology. This project initialized during my last semester (fall 2018) and was completed in December, 2018, lasting six months. I then presented the project to the faculty of the department of Sociology and Anthropology at SLU.

This project focuses on the impact of race on socioeconomic status among respondents from the General Social Survey - 2016. A statistical regression model was used as the theoretical framework to examine the differences in SES, with socioeconomic status as the dependent variable. Class-indicator variables such as working status, income, and education act as independent variables, attempting to explain as much variation as possible in SES scores.

Ultimately, social factors such as racial residential segregation, employment discrimination, educational discrimination, and class inequality negatively affect African Americans in metropolitan cities, corresponding with current literature on the topic of urban race-relations.

Repository Contents

• The data folder contains all data, raw/clean, used for this analysis.
• The documentation folder consists of the R project notebooks for each section of the analysis.
• The results folder includes images of the regression tables and other descriptive graphs.
• The source folder contains functions to make the R workflow easier.

Acknowledgements

I would like to specifically thank Dr. Chris Prener for being an outstanding mentor to me during the extent of this project. His progressive milestones and checkpoints allowed me to produce the best project in the amount of time possible. He also pushed and challenged my own assumptions along the way to ensure that this project was solid when it came time to present it to the faculty of the department.

About Carter

Carter Hanford graduated in 2018 from Saint Louis University (SLU) with a Sociology B.A. from the College of Arts and Sciences and a minor in Mathematics from the department of Mathematics and Statistics. He attended Jefferson College prior to his time at SLU, obtaining an associates degree in Mathematics. While an undergrad, Carter was a member of the Saint Louis University NCAA Division 1 baseball team, and during his time on the SLU Baseball team, he was a key contributor on the 2018 Atlantic-10 championship team, starting all 56 games at third base. Him and the team went on to compete on the national level, playing Ole Miss and Missouri State at the University of Mississippi on ESPN in front of 15,000+ fans.

Carter is now a graduate student working towards a Sociology M.A. and minors in GIS and research methodology from the department of sociology and anthropology. His research interests include: GIS, open-source coding (R, Python), quantitative analysis, and urban sociology. Carter works as a graduate research assistant in the department, conducting research with faculty members and also assisting in their teaching needs. Carter is a member of Dr. Christopher Prener's research team, PrenerLab, studying historical redlining practices in the city of St. Louis from a geopgraphic, spatial framework. Carter will graduate in 2021.

About Saint Louis University

Founded in 1818, Saint Louis University is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious Catholic institutions. Rooted in Jesuit values and its pioneering history as the first university west of the Mississippi River, SLU offers nearly 13,000 students a rigorous, transformative education of the whole person. At the core of the University’s diverse community of scholars is SLU’s service-focused mission, which challenges and prepares students to make the world a better, more just place.