Social Econ Blog

Description/Hypothesis:

Everyone at Harvard probably knows one Asian kid who is more "white" than Bryce: government concentrator, preppy, has predominantly white friends… He would be a prime example of someone who exhibits out-group favoritism by "acting white".

Minority groups tend to attempt to integrate with the dominate racial group (white) or to disassociate with one's own minority group when incentives to do so are high and the costs of not doing so are also high. Incentives: the white racial group is observed to be the dominant social group, and members of the dominates social group are assumed to be "higher quality" people due to their being in the dominant social group. Thus, friendship with members of the dominate group increases the social capital of members of minority groups by more than a similar friendship with a member of the minority group. Thus members of the minority group have incentives to seek out friendships with the dominate group. Indeed, if the returns to ties to the dominate group are high, we expect that minority group members might try and strengthen their connections with the majority group by emphasizing their similarity with the dominate group and de-emphasizing, or be hostile to, things which suggest differences, like speaking their native language. On the flip side, the costs of not integrating and being socially marginalized can be high. Thus, we would expect that being brought up in a suburban/rural area, where residents are mostly of the dominate racial group, incentives are high for someone of the minority race to try to integrate into the dominant group by rejecting to speak their native language.

Hypothesis: A minority brought up in a rural area may have a greater possibility of rejecting to speak their native language.

Data/Empirical Strategy

My data will come from the 2001-2002 California Workforce Survey, a telephone survey collected by the Survey Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. I will generate a variable including all those who are Asian and who spoke English at home. I will regress that variable on whether or not they lived in a rural area. To validate my hypothesis, there should be a positive correlation.

Alternatively, I am hoping to get data on the Prefrosh Minority program, and look at the effect of hometown characteristics on whether or not a minority chose to host another minority.

The control variables I can think of using are gender, age, and income.

Problems

The most important problem is simultaneity. Because this will be a correlation, a positive correlation can very well be because those who live in rural areas are those who have made a decision to assimilate and thus chose to live in rural areas. Then naturally they will not speak the native language at home.

Also, there are a lot of cases when it is the parents who decide whether their kids learned their native language as a kid. Asian languages are very hard to learn, thus even if someone wants to pick it up when they are older, it may be so hard that they give up easily. Thus, if the parents wanted to train their kid to speak English, they will speak the native language at home, and thus that will not have been an effect of living in a rural area, but an effect of their parents' wishes to assimilate.

// posted by Gretchen @ 5:56 AM