Timeframe
2005–2010
Funding
Royal Society of New Zealand
COMPASS staff
Peter Davis
Lyndon Walker
Babak Mahdavi Ardestani
Martin von Randow
Collaborators
University of Auckland
David O’Sullivan
Description
This main outputs from this study were in the form of two PhD theses.
Lyndon Walker’s thesis applied computer simulation techniques to census data on cohabitation to test a model of New Zealand’s social structure in the rapidly-changing demographic and economic conditions observed between 1981 and 2001. The central research question was whether or not social structure became more highly stratified and segregated over this period. Social structure was described as it was reflected in the distributions of “choices” of cohabitation partners – specifically who was matching with whom on the basis of ethnicity and highest qualification over the period. This study addressed various theoretical considerations including the very concept of choice, as compared to the observation of constraints in the “partner market”.
Babak Mahdavi Ardestani’s thesis employed similar simulation techniques with census data to model the causes, patterns, and consequences of urban residential segregation over time, and the roles of ethnicity and socioeconomic status in these. Segregation is an important topic in both geography and sociology, because of its potential impacts on the accessibility of services, especially in education and healthcare, but it is difficult to study changing patterns in residential location in cross-sections. Measuring static spatial patterns of segregation is difficult on its own, and changes occurring within neighbourhoods are more complex processes than we can really observe through a succession of static outcomes.
Studies that can describe and explain these transformations in more detail, both at the level of individual household decision-making and aggregate demographic shifts over time, are of great value to urban geographers and sociologists, and to that end, this project aimed:
- to explore linkages between the social micro (household level) and macro (social structure expressed through demographic patterns in geographical space) levels, and to operationalise these into the simulation.
- to demonstrate the usefulness of simulation modelling as an approach to understanding the dynamics of urban neighbourhood change.
- to develop an approach to the transparent verification of simulation models for residential segregation.
- to describe and measure past, present, and possible future patterns of residential location by ethnicity, focusing on changes observed in urban Auckland.
Both of these works established the census as a potential test-bed for modelling aspects of societal change. It provides rich demographic information, and access to multiple census cross-sections enables setting up and subsequently validating simulated estimates.