Downey Liam
Department of Sociology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, USA.
Sociol Spectr. 2005;25(6):651-675. doi: 10.1080/02732170500256633.
Environmental inequality researchers have studied the distribution of social groups around a variety of environmental hazards. However, researchers have focused their attention primarily on race and class-based environmental inequality, largely ignoring the question of whether other subordinate groups-children, the elderly, women, welfare recipients, single mother families-are disproportionately burdened by environmental hazards. I address this gap in the literature by asking whether single mother families are overrepresented in environmentally hazardous neighborhoods, whether the percentage of single mother families in a neighborhood is a better predictor than a neighborhood's racial and income characteristics of environmental hazard presence levels, and whether the representation of single mother families in environmentally hazardous neighborhoods is similar to that of single father families and married parent families.
环境不平等问题研究者们研究了各种环境危害周围社会群体的分布情况。然而，研究者们主要将注意力集中在基于种族和阶层的环境不平等上，很大程度上忽略了其他弱势群体——儿童、老年人、女性、福利领取者、单亲家庭——是否在环境危害中承受了不成比例的负担这一问题。我通过探究以下问题来填补文献中的这一空白：单亲家庭在存在环境危害的社区中所占比例是否过高；与社区的种族和收入特征相比，社区中单亲家庭的比例是否能更好地预测环境危害的存在程度；以及单亲家庭在存在环境危害的社区中的占比情况与单亲父亲家庭和已婚父母家庭是否相似。
