Mario L. Small

Do African Americans Prefer Payday Lenders? The Role of Spatial Exposure in Attitudes about Financial Institutions

Because African Americans are more likely to borrow from payday lenders (PDLs), some have speculated that they have more positive attitudes toward the lenders than other groups. But PDLs have also been shown to be disproportionately located in African American neighborhoods, and spatial exposure may contribute to attitudes. Based on original, nationally-representative survey data, we find that while African Americans report more negative attitudes about PDLs than about banks, they report significantly more positive attitudes about PDLs than white Americans do. Based on interview, survey, and experimental data, we find evidence that spatial exposure to PDLs improves attitudes toward them, by most indicators. Probing further, we find that negative experiences in conventional banks contribute to positive attitudes to PDLs. The findings are consistent with a theory in which spatial targeting by payday lenders benefits from institutional discrimination by banks, jointly shaping attitudes.

Mario L. Small, Ph.D., is Quetelet Professor of Social Science at Columbia University. A University of Bremen Excellence Chair, and an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, and the Sociological Research Association, Small has published award-winning articles and books on urban inequality, personal networks, and the relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods. His books include Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio, Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life––both of which received the C. Wright Mills Award for Best Book––and Someone To Talk To: How Networks Matter in Practice, which received the James Coleman Best Book Award among other honors. His most recent books are the co-edited, Personal Networks: Classic Readings and New Directions in Egocentric Analysis, whose 50 contributors provide a compendium of person-centered social network research, and the co-authored Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research, which provides strategies for assessing qualitative research from an empirical perspective. Small is currently studying the relationship between networks and decision-making, the ability of large-scale data to answer critical questions about urban inequality, and the relation between qualitative and quantitative methods