Social segregation outweighs geographical segregation in shaping connections
Unified framework for measuring segregation resolves how social and geographical space jointly shape connections
Social and Information Networks
Summary
It's hard to understand how where people live and who they connect with socially work together to create separation between groups. The authors created a new way to measure how social and geographical segregation combine, using data from Facebook and government sources. They found that social connections tend to separate more by race, education, and income than just location does. Also, people tend to connect more with similar groups even over longer distances, showing geography can indirectly increase social separation.
What this means in practice
- •For urban planners: Identify how social and geographic segregation jointly impact community connectivity to better design inclusive urban environments.
- •For public policy teams: Assess and target social versus spatial segregation effects to develop more effective interventions for social integration.
Authors
Johannes Happenhofer, Sahil Loomba, Till Hoffmann, Sumeet Agarwal, Nick S. Jones
Abstract
Our understanding of how geographical and social segregation interact remains limited, as relatively few studies investigate them jointly, and existing approaches often lack a framework distinguishing geographical, social, and total segregation. Additionally, large-scale individually resolved geo-social network data are rarely publicly available. We address both. Conceptually, we develop a unified framework that measures segregation in geosocial networks by comparing network models to appropriate null models and recovers the Theil index, dissimilarity index, and network modularity as special cases. Empirically, we turn to privacy-preserving aggregated relational data (ARD): we combine the Facebook Social Connectedness Index for the US with US Census and Pew data, and introduce an ARD-compatible joint geosocial intervening-opportunities model to infer link probabilities between region--group cell pairs. Applying our segregation framework, we find that social segregation predominates over geographical segregation, with notable separation for White--Black, college-degree--no-degree, and high-income--low/middle-income across both segregation types. We find increasing social homophily with geographical distance and group-specific geographical connectivity patterns, suggesting that geographical segregation may affect cross-group connectivity not only directly but also by amplifying social segregation.