Besides traditional measures of segregation developed and used by sociologists, several spatial measures of segregation have been proposed. However, they have not been adopted widely partly because there are difficult to implement even with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology, and their utilities have not been extensively documented through empirical studies. This project will 1) develop programs (Avenue scripts) in the most popular desktop GIS (ArcView) to implement the set of spatial segregation measures; 2)compare and demonstrate the different in results from spatial and traditional measures of segregation; and 3) explore and identify factors determining the different results from the two types of measures. The programs developed will be disseminated to the public. It is hoped that more researchers will have access to these spatial measures of segregation through the dissemination of the developed programs. The investigators will also be able to show how the two measures yield different results and how they complement each other. The results from comparing the two types of measures will enable use to develop a better understand on the spatial dimension of segregation.
