Doctoral Dissertation Research: Understanding Americans' Thinking about Inequality

美国日益加剧的经济不平等引起了许多美国人的注意。无论政治意识形态和收入水平如何，大多数美国人都对他们在美国看到的收入和财富的不平等持批评态度，大多数美国人都希望有一个更平等的分配。然而，长期以来的理论预期是，随着财富和收入集中度的增加，对再分配的需求会增加，而最近的证据表明，对再分配政策的支持似乎会随着不平等的加剧而减少。本研究将通过深入考察美国人对经济不平等现象的思考，来理解美国人对再分配政策的困惑情绪。公众舆论对再分配政策的混乱和不和谐的本质表明，有必要使用定性方法进行研究，这种方法独特地适合于捕捉和理解这些混乱但有影响力的情绪。这项研究正是这样做的，它使用深度访谈（分为富裕社区和贫困社区）来探索美国人对经济不平等思考的复杂性，同时通过创造性地重新参与20世纪80年代初对这一主题的有影响力的定性研究（詹妮弗·霍克希尔德的《什么是公平？》），提供了一个强大的跨时间视角。利用重新拜访霍克希尔德？这个项目将她的发现扩展到新的实证方向，以利用过去几十年的巨大经济变化。如果正如证据所表明的那样，大多数美国人对目前的收入分配不满意，那么了解他们对变革的渴望，以及这种渴望与他们对解决方案的看法是如何联系或分离的，对广泛的利益相关者来说是很重要的，包括所有那些试图理解不平等和差距的学者、政策制定者和公民。

Growing economic inequality in the U.S. has captured the attention of many Americans. Across political ideologies and income ranges, most Americans are critical of the inequality in income and wealth they see in the U.S., and most Americans want a more equal distribution. However, contrary to long-standing theoretical expectations that would predict a rise in the demand for redistribution in response to increasing wealth and income concentration, recent evidence suggests that support for redistributive policy appears to decrease in response to increasing inequality. This research will make sense of Americans' confusing sentiments about redistributive policy through an in-depth examination of Americans' thinking about the phenomenon of economic inequality.The muddled and dissonant nature of public opinion toward redistributive policies suggests the need for a study using qualitative methods that are uniquely suited to capture and make sense of these kinds of messy but influential sentiments. This research does just that, using in-depth interviews (divided among rich and poor neighborhoods) to probe the complexity of Americans' thinking about economic inequality while providing a powerful cross-time perspective through the creative re-engagement of an influential qualitative study on the topic from the early 1980s (Jennifer Hochschild's What's Fair?). Using a revisit to Hochschild?s site and methods to capitalize on the dramatic economic changes over the past several decades, this project extends her findings in new empirical directions. If, as the evidence suggests, a majority of Americans are dissatisfied with current income distributions, then understanding their desire for change and how it is connected or disconnected from their opinions about solutions is of importance to a broad range of stakeholders, including all of those scholars, policy makers, and citizens who seek to understand inequality and disparity.