Dissertation

My dissertation research focuses on the inequality faced by the Latinx population by examining an axis of difference within this panethnic population: race. I examine racial diversity within the panethnic Latinx population to understand if Latinx individuals are either a collective minority, assimilate to whiteness, occupy a distinctive position between Black and White people, or occupy all three roles simultaneously. I focus on economic and health outcomes and examine whether reception context, national climate, and neighborhood characteristics differentially relate to these disparities by racialized group using social media data and geospatial methods.

To answer this overarching question, my doctoral dissertation includes three empirical chapters asking the following questions:

(1) How does the relation between anti-Latinx prejudice and income vary by race within the Latinx population?

(2) How do changes in national attitudes toward Latinx people differentially impact the mental health of Latinx racialized groups?

(3) How is racial and ethnic residential segregation differentially associated with income for Latinx people from different races?

I use American Community Survey (ACS) data, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data, and Twitter Data to answer these questions utilizing natural language processing, spatial methods, and hierarchical linear modeling. I measure local and national attitudes towards racial/ethnic minority groups using a dataset of approximately 15 million Tweets that I collected using the Academic Twitter API prior to its depreciation. I also measure segregation using ACS data to calculate disimilarity, isolation, and entropy indices.