Résumé : Where we live and work can have measurable impacts on health, income, education, and a whole host of other individual characteristics. That location matters is arguably the fundamental premise of geographic thought. Yet identifying the nature and magnitude of contextual effects remains an elusive proposition. One reason for this is that we struggle to identify the correct context that shapes an individual. Part of the problem can be linked to the limitations of data collection and the units we use. A portion of this talk explores uncertainty introduced when we adopt units of observation that are not ideal for the questions we are asking. Another part of the problem is that contextual effects are the outcome of processes operating on multiple scales and so our tendency to treat effects as operating at a single scale introduces the possibility that our measures miss key mechanisms shaping outcomes we observe. Throughout the talk I use the case of neighborhood-scale effects of race and segregation in the U.S. as an empirical example of how these mechanisms function.

Papers serving as the basis for this talk :
1. Who are the People in my Neighborhood ? : The “Contextual Fallacy” of Measuring Individual Context with Census Geographies CS Fowler, N Frey, DC Folch, N Nagle, S Spielman (2019) Geographical Analysis
2. “Planning Dissonance” and the Bases for Stably Diverse Neighborhoods : The Case of South Seattle A Lumley‐Sapanski, CS Fowler (2017) City & Community 16 (1), 86-115
3. Segregation as a multiscalar phenomenon and its implications for neighborhood-scale research : The case of South Seattle 1990–2010 C S. Fowler (2017) Urban geography 37 (1), 1-25