Geoffrey Wodtke

Social scientists have long strived to understand the impact of different social contexts, such as the family, neighborhood, and school environment, on child development and, ultimately, on the reproduction of inequalities from one generation to the next. Most empirical studies that attempt to quantify these impacts, however, suffer from a set of interrelated problems regarding the role of time. In particular, prior empirical research does not define the causal effects of interest within an appropriate temporal framework, often fails to measure the full sequence of contextual exposures experienced by children throughout the early life course, and relies on estimation methods that are incapable of recovering these effects without making unrealistic assumptions about the selection processes that determine contextual exposures. My research in this area examines the effects of concentrated neighborhood poverty on child outcomes from a temporal and developmental perspective, and it uses novel methods that can recover these effects under a weaker set of assumptions than conventional methods. 

Although a large volume of evidence now indicates that neighborhood poverty significantly impedes child development, social scientists are still far from understanding the mechanisms that mediate the harmful consequences of growing up in a poor neighborhood. That is, we do not know very much about how differences in neighborhood context engender differences in intermediate variables, like school quality or the presence of environmental health hazards, that in turn affect learning and development. Indeed, a frequent criticism of research on the effects of neighborhood poverty is that the mediators commonly hypothesized to explain them remain obscured in a “black box.”  

In my recent work, I address this limitation by investigating whether differences in the school environment to which children are exposed by virtue of their residential location mediate the effects of neighborhood poverty on academic achievement. I am also in the midst of a project that aims to shed light into the “black box” of neighborhood effects by investigating whether these effects are explained by differences in exposure to environmental health hazards, such as neurotoxic air pollution and household lead contamination. The project seeks to answer these questions by analyzing several different longitudinal surveys of child development, including the Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies and the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, matched with administrative data from the National Center for Education Statistics, Environmental Protection Agency, and Chicago Department of Public Health. With these matched sources, I am integrating new methods of causal inference with machine learning for high-dimensional data in an effort to identify the most important mediators connecting concentrated poverty with child developmental outcomes.  

Selected Publications

• Wodtke, Geoffrey T., Ugur Yildirim, David J. Harding, and Felix Elwert. 2023. “Are Neighborhood Effects Explained by Differences in School Quality?” American Journal of Sociology 128:1472-1528. doi:10.1086/684137.  
• Wodtke, Geoffrey T., Kerry Ard, Clair Bullock, Kailey White, and Betsy Priem. 2022. “Concentrated Poverty, Ambient Air Pollution, and Child Cognitive Development.” Science Advances 8:1-19. doi:10.1126/sciadv.add0285. 
• Wodtke, Geoffrey T., Sagi Ramaj, and Jared Schachner. 2022. “Toxic Neighborhoods: The Effects of Concentrated Poverty and Environmental Lead Contamination on Early Childhood Development.” Demography 59:1275-1298. doi:10.1215/00703370-10047481. 
• Wodtke, Geoffrey T., Felix Elwert, and David J. Harding. 2016. “Neighborhood Effect Heterogeneity by Family Income and Developmental Period.” American Journal of Sociology 121:1168-1222. doi:10.1086/684137. 
• Wodtke, Geoffrey T., David J. Harding, and Felix Elwert. 2011. “Neighborhood Effects in Temporal Perspective: The Impact of Long-Term Exposure to Concentrated Disadvantage on High School Graduation.” American Sociological Review 76:713-736. doi:10.1177/0003122411420816. 

Income inequality has increased substantially in the United States since the early 1980s. Social scientists have for centuries theorized, studied, and debated the role that ownership and authority relations within production play in the generation and evolution of income inequality over time. Yet, despite the centrality of ownership and authority relations in social theory, contemporary empirical research has largely ignored their link to growing income dispersion over the past four decades, focusing instead on shifting patterns of occupational income differences and trends in the income returns to education and other demographic characteristics.  

My research on the American class structure addressed this critical gap in studies of income inequality by examining temporal changes in the ownership and authority structure of the American economy, estimating shifts in the income returns to ownership and authority over time, and linking these changes to growth in income inequality at the population level since the early 1980s. Drawing on a theoretical framework that views ownership and authority relations as the defining features of class structure, this multipart project divides individuals into four basic classes—proprietors, managers, independent producers, and workers. It then asks whether these classes have changed in size and demographic composition over time, how income distribution between individuals in different class positions has evolved in recent decades, and to what extent have divergent income trajectories between classes and size shifts in class structure contributed to growing income inequality at the population level.  

Key findings from this research suggest that social classes have remained relatively stable in terms of their size over the past three decades and that differences in their demographic and educational composition have also remained largely intact, with women and racial minorities still severely underrepresented in positions of ownership and control in the workplace. Results also indicate that incomes for proprietors and managers have substantially increased since the 1980s, while incomes for workers at the bottom of workplace ownership and authority structures have stagnated or declined. This pattern of income divergence between class positions persists even after controlling for demographic, occupational, and educational changes. And variance decomposition analyses indicate that it accounts for a considerable proportion of growth in income inequality at the population level since the 1980s. Beyond income inequality, I have also investigated social class differences in a broader set of life conditions and political attitudes, such as measures of subjective happiness and health along with indicators of voting behavior and partisan identification, where I find large and persistent differences in political attitudes and life conditions between social classes defined in terms of workplace ownership and authority. 

Currently, I’m working on a new project that examines how ownership of privately held business assets has contributed to trends in wealth inequality in the U.S. Although privately held businesses are central to the American economy, little is known about how their assets are distributed among the population. To better understand rising and persistent wealth inequalities, my collaborators and I are working to describe the household distribution of private business assets in the United States and examine how it has changed over time. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, preliminary findings indicate that the relative number of business owners has remained stagnant at low levels and that assets in privately held firms have become increasingly concentrated. For example, in 2019, the top 1% of households controlled nearly 80% of private business assets, up from about 70% in the late 1980s. We will attempt to explain this trend by evaluating how technological change, the financialization of banking, and the rising market power of large public firms have shaped the distribution of privately held business assets in recent decades. Our early findings suggest that all three factors are associated with increasing asset concentration in this sector. 

Selected Publications

• Zhou, Xiang and Geoffrey T. Wodtke. 2019. “Income Stratification among Occupational Classes in the United States.” Social Forces 97:945-972. doi:10.1093/sf/soy074. 
• Wodtke, Geoffrey T. 2017. “Social Relations, Technical Divisions, and Class Stratification in the United States: An Empirical Test of the Death and Decomposition of Class Hypotheses.” Social Forces 95:1479-1508. doi:10.1093/sf/sox012. 
• Wodtke, Geoffrey T. 2016. “Social Class and Income Inequality in the United States: Ownership, Authority, and Personal Income Distribution from 1980 to 2010.” American Journal of Sociology 121:1375-1415. doi:10.1086/684273. 

Intergroup attitudes are central to the reproduction and legitimation of material inequalities. An important theoretical perspective in the study of intergroup attitudes is that prejudice, negative stereotypes, and opposition to different programs designed to attenuate group-based inequalities are structured by conflict over resources and the group interests that emerge within this competition. My research in this area investigates the implications of this theoretical framework for the effects of institutions and individual faculties, such as the formal education system and cognitive ability, on different types of racial attitudes. Although it is now essentially a cultural axiom that an advanced education and sophisticated cognitive abilities attenuate prejudice, breakdown negative stereotypes, and promote support for policies designed to redress racial inequality, my research suggests that the attitudinal effects of education and cognitive ability are more complicated than is commonly assumed. 

For example, I have investigated the effects of education on negative racial stereotypes, perceptions of discrimination, and support for several workplace affirmative action policies among White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian adults. Findings from this project indicate that there are considerable differences in the attitudinal effects of education across racial groups and across different types of racial attitudes. Education has a liberalizing effect on negative racial stereotypes toward outgroups among Whites and Blacks, but this effect is far less pronounced, and in some cases completely muted, among Asians and Hispanics. In addition, education often has no effect on racial policy attitudes, and for certain policies, like racial preferences in hiring and promotion, education appears to have a significant negative effect on policy support.

Selected Publications

• Wodtke, Geoffrey T. 2018. “The Effects of Education on Beliefs about Racial Inequality.” Social Psychology Quarterly 81:273-294. doi:10.1177/0190272518804145. 
• Wodtke, Geoffrey T. 2016. “Are Smart People Less Racist? Verbal Ability, Anti-black Prejudice, and the Principle-policy Paradox.” Social Problems 63:21-45. doi:10.1093/socpro/spv028. 
• Wodtke, Geoffrey T. 2012. “The Impact of Education on Intergroup Attitudes: A Multiracial Analysis.” Social Psychology Quarterly 75:80-106. doi:10.1177/0190272511430234. 

Analyses of time-varying exposures, like neighborhood or school contexts, as well as analyses of causal mediation are complicated by the presence of exposure-induced confounders. An exposure-induced confounder is a variable that is affected by the exposure of interest and that must also be controlled in order to estimate the causal effects of interest. For example, in analyses of whether living in a disadvantaged neighborhood affects academic achievement, parental income is likely affected by prior neighborhood conditions and also may confound and/or possibly moderate the effects of future residential choices on achievement. Exposure-induced confounders are challenging because they may lead to bias both when they are left uncontrolled and when they are controlled for naively using conventional methods. They would therefore seem to present a “damned if do and damned if you don’t” dilemma for social scientists interested in estimating causal effects in longitudinal settings.  

My research in this area focuses on developing, adapting, and extending new methods for estimating causal effects in the presence of exposure-induced confounding—a methodological challenge that plagues not only my own substantive work on contextual effects but also many other areas of inquiry in sociology. The methods I have worked on therefore have the potential for wide application, wherever exposures of interest vary over time. Moreover, these methods are also useful in my work aimed at identifying mechanisms that mediate the harmful consequences of spatially concentrated poverty, as the challenges associated with exposure-induced confounders also commonly afflict analyses of this type as well. 

Selected Publications

• Wodtke, Geoffrey T. 2020. “Regression-based Adjustment for Time-varying Confounders.” Sociological Methods and Research 49:906-946. doi:10.1177/0049124118769087. 
• Zhou, Xiang and Geoffrey T. Wodtke. 2020. “Residual Balancing: A Method of Constructing Weights for Marginal Structural Models.” Political Analysis 28:487-506. doi:10.1017/pan.2020.2. 
• Wodtke, Geoffrey T. and Xiang Zhou. 2020. “Effect Decomposition in the Presence of Treatment-induced Confounding: A Regression-with-residuals Approach.” Epidemiology 31:369-375. doi:10.1097/EDE.0000000000001168. 
• Wodtke, Geoffrey T. and Daniel Almirall. 2017. “Estimating Moderated Causal Effects with Time-varying Treatments and Time-varying Effect Moderators: Structural Nested Mean Models and Regression-with-residuals.” Sociological Methodology 47:212-245. doi:10.1177/0081175017701180.