Abstract
Focusing on neighborhoods that researchers consider particularly diverse, this paper assesses the ways scholars have characterized neighborhood racial diversity in the United States. Social scientists use a variety of methods to define and measure highly racially diverse places, resulting in a single label being used to capture very different aspects of a census tract's racial demography. We examine the criteria used to classify neighborhood racial diversity to bring perspective on the logic behind various approaches. We then group the range of schemas into several broad types from which we choose a representative four. These form the basis for a series of empirical comparisons using U.S. Census data to reveal the contexts where the taxonomies produce similar outcomes and those where they do not. The analysis goes on to consider the implications stemming from the choices social scientists make when they opt for one approach over another.