Beliefs about the Causes of Racial Inequality: The Persisting Impact of Urban and Suburban Locations?

Table 1

Mean scores for Beliefs Index^# by urban/suburban/rural: 1977–2010.

	Overall	1980s	1990s	2000s	Δ
Urban	6.26^*
Suburban	6.12^*
Rural	6.01^*
Urban		6.13	6.29^*	6.35^*	+.22
Suburban		6.05	6.15^*	6.16^*	+.11
Rural		6.04	6.04^*	5.93^*	−.11
	N = 17267	N = 5984	N = 6769	N = 4514

^*Using a Tukey HSD post hoc test associated with a one-way ANOVA, this notates a significant difference at the  .001 probability level that fall in a hierarchy when cross comparing the locations. Accordingly, with a higher mean score, urban residents maintain more tolerant or structural beliefs about the causes of racial inequality and, with lower scores, rural residents maintain more intolerant or individualistic beliefs about the cause of racial inequality and, with a mean score in the middle, uburban residents fall in between their beliefs. That is to say, suburban residents maintain beliefs about racial inequality that is significantly less tolerant than urban residents, yet more tolerant than their rural counterparts. This holds for the pooled data as well as when the data is split by decade.
^#The Explanation Index includes the following four questions in reference to the following statement: “on the average (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) have worse, jobs, income, and housing than White people.” The questions include (1) do you think these differences are mainly due to discrimination (0: No; 1: Yes); (2) because most (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) have less in-born ability to learn? (0: Yes; 1: No); (3) because most (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) don’t have the chance for education that it takes to rise out of poverty? (0: No; 1: Yes); and (4) because most (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) just don’t have the motivation or will power to pull themselves up out of poverty? (0: Yes; 1: No).