Abstract
Opportunity Atlas is a web-based longitudinal data analysis tool that enables users to see how the neighborhood where a person is raised impacts residents’ long-term social and economic mobility. Opportunity Atlas attempts to answer the question, “Which neighborhoods in America offer children the best chance to rise out of poverty?” and targets a nonexpert audience. The website and data tool are the result of collaboration between the U.S. Census Bureau and Opportunity Insights, a research group at Harvard University. Using anonymized census data, Opportunity Atlas enables users to explore how place impacts social mobility through census tract–level estimates of various mobility outcomes in adulthood of children born between 1978 and 1983. These mobility outcomes include household income, incarceration rate, and high school graduation rate. Opportunity Atlas is therefore a relevant tool to a wide range of course topics, including stratification, race, criminology, gender, and education. Moreover, given the wealth of data available on Opportunity Atlas, it may be useful for classes covering research methods, data interpretation, and data visualization.
Opportunity Atlas appears as a map of the United States with several menus used to filter the display by location, data, and demographics. To start, users can determine where the application is focused, using a city name or specific address to zoom in on areas of particular interest. For instance, when using this site, we had students zoom in on their hometowns. Users can also choose which data are displayed on the map. These data represent outcomes of children raised in a particular neighborhood, including earnings, incarceration rates, and the percentage of residents who stayed in the same census tract as adults, as well as neighborhood-level characteristics of the census tract today, such as the poverty rate, population density, and the percentage of residents who graduated from college. Finally, users can choose which outcomes they would like to see displayed. The demographic data available are parents’ income (all, high, or low), child’s race (all, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian), and child’s gender (all, male, female). These different options enable students to see how people of different classes, races, and genders fare in different regions of the United States.
The site also includes built-in stories that do not require students to manipulate the menus or interpret data on their own. The stories appear as bubbles on the map and, when clicked, direct students toward premade regional analyses, addressing questions such as “Is upward mobility higher in cities or rural areas?” Users may choose these stories to look at social mobility in a specific place (e.g., Compton, California) or a specific issue (e.g., “Race and Economic Opportunity in America”). Once users click on a story, they are directed to a premade analysis that can be scrolled through at their own pace. These stories provide both data visualization and a text interpreting the data for the user, making them a good option for students unfamiliar with data analysis or interpretation.
Opportunity Atlas is designed to speak to the literature on social mobility; therefore it is especially useful for courses on stratification and inequality. The tool showcases the long-term impact of one’s residential location and thus would be useful for teaching sociological concepts such as how people came to live where they do, redlining, and economic and educational segregation. This tool could be paired with lesson plans like the “Exploring Home Ownership, Residential Segregation, and the Growing Racial Wealth Gap” TRAILS activity by Dr. Jeneve Brooks (2014), which, in part, asks students to reflect on how their families’ homeownership patterns, residential location, and wealth building are associated with their race. Opportunity Atlas supplements lessons such as this by enabling students to visualize race-based differences in wealth through data. For example, students might consider how children of different races have fared in their hometowns. In looking at this, some students may discover that racial gaps in important outcomes, such as income or incarceration rates, are much larger in their hometown than what they previously thought. It may also be that some students will discover, as ours did, that they live in neighborhoods too racially homogenous for data on races other than white to be available. Even if this occurs, it opens up a discussion of how redlining and other discriminatory practices enabled the residential segregation they are witnessing.
Likewise, Opportunity Atlas can be used in classes on urban sociology by illustrating the effects of neighborhood on a variety of outcomes related to mobility. The tool can also be paired with foundational readings in urban sociology from W. E. B Du Bois (1996), Jane Jacobs (1961), and Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton (1993). Additionally, this tool can enhance experience-based urban sociology lesson plans. For example, this tool could be paired with TRAILS lessons such as the “Neighborhood Tour Project” by Dr. Colleen Elizabeth Wynn (2019). This assignment asks students to explore neighborhoods in the city, discuss where the boundaries of each neighborhood start and end, which current issues the neighborhood is facing, and how the neighborhood developed. Opportunity Atlas could enhance assignments like this by allowing students to compare how their personal experiences visiting different neighborhoods relate to the quantitative data on life chances for people in different neighborhoods. For example, upon visiting neighborhoods in person, as suggested by Wynn’s TRAILS assignment, students could formulate hypotheses about how living in that neighborhood may affect the chances that people will finish high school, find a job, have a better income, or achieve other important outcomes. Students could then compare how their predictions are supported (or not) by the data available at Opportunity Atlas. Moreover, students can identify features of neighborhoods (e.g., parks, libraries) that might benefit residents in improving their long-term outcomes.
Overall, our classes using Opportunity Atlas were more engaging than traditional lectures, in both our opinion and that of students. In particular, we found that group discussions after students used the tool were particularly productive and insightful, as students were able to draw from concrete data, make sense of data limitations, and hypothesize reasons for potentially divergent outcomes. In our classes, we developed worksheets for students to fill out while using Opportunity Atlas. These worksheets asked students to compare their hometown with a neighboring town and make within-neighborhood comparisons of how white and black residents and high-income and low-income residents fared in the long term in regard to income and education. After filling out this worksheet, students debated whether their perceptions of their home neighborhoods were corroborated or contradicted by the data shown in the atlas and why. In particular, many students were surprised by differences in outcomes within their neighborhoods (e.g., how white people and people of color have different chances to get a job or to have higher earnings) as well as by the differences between their neighborhoods and adjacent neighborhoods (e.g., how people may have drastically different chances to get a job or have higher earnings depending on which street they live on). Although the Opportunity Atlas does a great job of giving concrete numbers on the neighborhood effects on social inequalities, it does not explain how these effects take place. Therefore, we found it particularly useful to have students hypothesize the mechanisms through which place affects the variety of outcomes present in the atlas (e.g., access to better public schools, chances of being the victim of crimes).
The Opportunity Atlas website provides an opportunity for students to use and interpret data without having to first learn how to use statistical analysis software. Some students may have difficulty in adjusting the site’s analysis tools and interpreting the data on their own. Therefore, instructors should be prepared to devote time to teach students to both use the site’s tools and interpret their findings. One strategy instructors could use to save time is to have students go over the tutorials of Opportunity Atlas before class. Because Opportunity Atlas targets a nonexpert audience, it provides tutorials, in both abbreviated and detailed versions, on how to use the site as well as documents that assist with data interpretation. Alternatively, instructors could assign the premade stories within the data tool, which require no manipulation of data and include interpretation of the data.
The researchers behind Opportunity Atlas also provide accessible summaries of trends in the data, outlining changes in economic mobility, educational attainment, incarceration, and even life expectancy, which can be assigned to students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Similarly, several news outlets have covered Opportunity Atlas’s insights, providing further resources for lessons using the tool. For example, NPR has several segments (online and radio) drawing on Opportunity Atlas data. One, “The American Dream: One Block Can Make All the Difference” (Garsd 2018), explores the divergent outcomes for people who grew up only a block apart in Brooklyn.
As with any data source, Opportunity Atlas has limitations. Due to concerns about anonymity, data may not be available for every variable in every census tract. However, this limitation can also be used as a tool to talk about data collection, anonymity, and the research process in general. We even discussed these limitations in terms of residential segregation, as many neighborhoods lack the diversity to have data on multiple racial groups per census tract. To aid in having these conversations and knowing the limits of the data, Opportunity Atlas includes detailed appendices and a FAQ on the potential limitations of its data.
Overall, Opportunity Atlas is an accessible tool to teach students of all levels about social mobility, income and racial inequalities, and data analysis. Its multiple features make it possible to use in classes ranging from undergraduate Introduction to Sociology classes to graduate Research Methods classes. Undergraduate classes can utilize the guided analysis in the “stories” function or perform worksheet-driven analysis exercises to better understand how their course readings apply to real communities. By comparison, graduate students can benefit from practicing data analysis and interpretation in Opportunity Atlas as well as discuss the benefits and limitations of the data by drawing on the detailed methodology available on the site. Graduate students and advanced undergraduate students may also use Opportunity Atlas’s visualization tools to formulate potential research questions and hypotheses related to social stratification. Opportunity Atlas fits well with the curriculum of many foundational sociology courses and supports efforts to improve students’ capacity to analyze data by providing a more hands-on approach. Additionally, the website helps students understand and measure the ways in which inequalities are present in the lives of Americans living in different places. Finally, the site is a good tool for instructors because it provides high-level summaries, popular news stories, and guided analyses that can easily fit into lesson plans while also providing detailed tutorials and technical notes to guide website usage.