The Residential Segregation of Same-Sex Partnered Households from Heterosexual Partnered Households in U.S. Cities

Danielle Deng, Texas A&M University

Most sociological and demographic research on segregation in the U.S. has tended to focus on the segregation of racial and ethnic minorities from the majority. Homosexual people are usually overlooked in studies of residential segregation because of their small numbers. Therefore, this paper attempts to fill this gap by focusing on homosexual-heterosexual segregation in the U.S. I conduct a systematic analysis by using U.S. Census data; I calculate both conventional dissimilarity index and unbiased dissimilarity index for 100 U.S. cities and compare the different results of the two types of dissimilarity index; and I construct my own theory to explain the variation in homosexual-heterosexual residential segregation across the 100 U.S. cities by assuming the dynamic behind homosexual-heterosexual segregation is different from racial ethnic segregation. Major contributions of my paper are advancing our understanding of the patterns of homosexual-heterosexual segregation in the U.S. and rethinking the bias of conventional dissimilarity index.