| Description |
The Polarization Hypothesis has been a fruitful area of research in urban sociology over the past several decades. Polarization itself is a multifaceted phenomena, dealing with the middle class, the poles of the income distribution, spatial polarization/segregation and changes over time. As of yet, the interaction of the multiple facets and their definition has not been addressed. This manuscript uses a single, geographically fine grained, time-series dataset to investigate the definitional boundaries of polarization measurement from 2002-2011 in urban areas in the United States. Methods include Hierarchical Linear Models and Cusp Catastrophe models to explicitly deal with time. Multiple dependent variables are used to check and see if key assumptions of the Polarization Hypothesis hold true when dealing with each facet (income distribution, and spatial) of polarization over time in a large scale statistical analysis. |
