Historically, blacks have viewed their lower socioeconomic status, relative to whites, as a result of structural limitations of society. People, white and black, have accepted that blacks have had more difficulty in making economic advancement due to societal barriers such as discrimination. As structural barriers have come down and it has become easier for blacks to move into the economic mainstream, it may be that those blacks who are moving upward no longer see structural limitations as the reason for economic inequality.Recent research distinguishes between two types of explanations for the gap. Theindividual explanation asserts that blacks' lower socioeconomic status is due to a lack of will power or effort on the part of blacks. In contrast, the structural explanation states that institutional barriers such as discrimination are to blame for the black-white socioeconomic gap. This study laid a solid foundation for an analysis of explanations for the black-white socioeconomic gap. However, it failed to investigate the relative proportion of blacks who adopt these explanations.It is the purpose of this paper to determine whether the individual and structural explanations for economic inequality is the same for blacks and whites.The most recent data from the General Social Survey is used to investigate this possibility. The sample and sub-sample sizes are 1517 and 1024, respectfully. / Department of Sociology

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David Rusk claims in Cities Without Suburbs that elastic American cities are less segregated than other American cities. I demonstrate through statistical analyses that there is a strong correlation between Rusk's elasticity (an index comprised of a central city's annexation history since 1950 and its population density) and his income segregation index. The statistical correlation between these two variables is stronger than between Rusk's segregation index and any other variable I test, including city age, size, regional location, and black population percentage. I then consider several hypotheses that may explain these correlations and propose that the continuous annexation of peripheral, developing land by a central city prevents the incorporation of affluent suburbs. Suburban boundaries, especially those of affluent suburbs, function as population sorting mechanisms, which segregate migrant households by socioeconomic status and life-style. I ascertain that only rapidly growing, unbounded central cities prevent or ameliorate segregation by being elastic. / Department of Urban Planning

Yeung, Ion Lam. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013. / Includes bibliographical references. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts also in Chinese.