Michael Jones-Correa and Gary Segura plan to explore the effect of contextual variation on Latino attitudes and opinions about politics and life in the United States. They are collecting a wide array of geographically specific data capturing the varying political, social and demographic contexts in which Latino survey respondents live, and appending these data to a new state-stratified survey of over 8,000 Latinos they are conducting with other investigators. The geographically specific data collected will range from information from the Census-on neighborhood socio-economic status, racial and ethnic diversity, and residential segregation, for example-to elections and representation data at the municipal, county, district, and state levels, as well as education data on school boards, teachers, administrators and per pupil expenditures. Matching survey data together with geographically aggregated demographic and political data makes it possible to place respondents' individual attitudes and behaviors in context, and to critically analyze how these contexts might shape or influence individual attitudes, opinion and behavior. In short, survey responses convey more meaning to researchers if they are enriched with the context from which the respondent sees the world, and result in significant insights beyond what could be achieved with survey data alone. The growth and diversification of the Latino population in the US present a variety of political and policy challenges. Combining individual and contextual data is critical for understanding topics as diverse as political representation, educational policy and the consequences of residential segregation. Jones-Correa and Segura plan to make these unique data immediately available to the larger research community. The data and the resulting analyses will inform, among other questions, how Latino political life and attitudes differ between traditional majority-Latino and newly emerging majority-Anglo communities, how interactions between racial and ethnic groups vary with respect to relative population sizes, and how social and economic mobility might vary.
