People in Context: Perceptions of Social Dissonance and Community Involvement

Social inequalities are embedded in spatially-related patterns, and spatial boundaries and distributions connect and exclude social groups in ways that influence their life outcomes. In this dissertation, I investigate how communities create and respond to these spatially-stratified contexts. The time and resources that people invest into their communities gives an indication of the degree to which these contexts will continue to be advantaged or disadvantaged places to live for the next cohort of residents, reproducing inherited contextual effects. What are the primary mechanisms by which community contexts relate to social outcomes? I investigate how an exit, loyalty, voice framework helps to explain the ways residents respond to their neighborhood contexts. To do this, I analyze nationally-representative survey data and linked Census data on the residential locations of survey respondents. I focus in particular on perceptions of context and find that people's subjective experiences of their neighborhood context matter just as much, if not more, than their objective structural neighborhood situations.