Person:

Sampson, Robert

Disparities in verbal ability, a major predictor of later life outcomes, have generated widespread debate, but few studies have been able to isolate neighborhood-level causes in a developmentally and ecologically appropriate way. This study presents longitudinal evidence from a large-scale study of >2,000 children ages 6–12 living in Chicago, along with their caretakers, who were followed wherever they moved in the U.S. for up to 7 years. African-American children are exposed in such disproportionate numbers to concentrated disadvantage that white and Latino children cannot be reliably compared, calling into question traditional research strategies assuming common points of overlap in ecological risk. We therefore focus on trajectories of verbal ability among African-American children, extending recently developed counterfactual methods for time-varying causes and outcomes to adjust for a wide range of predictors of selection into and out of neighborhoods. The results indicate that living in a severely disadvantaged neighborhood reduces the later verbal ability of black children on average by ≈ 4 points, a magnitude that rivals missing a year or more of schooling.

This article reveals the grounds on which individuals form perceptions of disorder. Integrating ideas about implicit bias and statistical discrimination with a theoretical framework on neighborhood racial stigma, our empirical test brings together personal interviews, census data, police records, and systematic social observations situated within some 500 block groups in Chicago. Observed disorder predicts perceived disorder, but racial and economic context matter more. As the concentration of minority groups and poverty increases, residents of all races perceive heightened disorder even after we account for an extensive array of personal characteristics and independently observed neighborhood conditions. Seeing disorder appears to be imbued with social meanings that go well beyond what essentialist theories imply, generating self-reinforcing processes that may help account for the perpetuation of urban racial inequality.

This article reports on the influence of neighborhood-level deprivation and collective efficacy on children’s antisocial behavior between the ages of 5 and 10 years. Latent growth curve modeling was applied to characterize the developmental course of antisocial behavior among children in the E-Risk Longitudinal Twin Study, an epidemiological cohort of 2,232 children. Children in deprived versus affluent neighborhoods had higher levels of antisocial behavior at school entry (24.1 vs. 20.5, p .001) and a slower rate of decline from involvement in antisocial behavior between the ages of 5 and 10 (0.54 vs. 0.78, p .01). Neighborhood collective efficacy was negatively associated with levels of antisocial behavior at school entry (r .10, p .01) but only in deprived neighborhoods; this relationship held after controlling for neighborhood problems and family-level factors. Collective efficacy did not predict the rate of change in antisocial behavior between the ages of 5 and 10. Findings suggest that neighborhood collective efficacy may have a protective effect on children living in deprived contexts.

This article develops a conceptual framework on civil society that shifts the dominant focus on individuals to collective action events— civic and protest alike—that bring people together in public to realize a common purpose. Analyzing over 4,000 events in the Chicago area from 1970 to 2000, the authors find that while civic engagement is durable overall, “sixties-style” protest declines, and hybrid events that combine public claims making with civic forms of behavior — what they call “blended social action”—increase. Furthermore, dense social ties, group memberships, and neighborly exchange do not predict community variations in collective action. The density of nonprofit organizations matters instead, suggesting that declines in traditional social capital may not be as consequential for civic capacity as commonly thought.

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing experiment has proven to be an important intervention not just in the lives of the poor, but in social science theories of neighborhood effects. Competing causal claims have been the subject of considerable disagreement, culminating in the debate between Clampet‐Lundquist and Massey and Ludwig et al. in this issue. This article assesses the debate by clarifying analytically distinct questions posed by neighborhood‐level theories, reconceptualizing selection bias as a fundamental social process worthy of study in its own right rather than a statistical nuisance, and reconsidering the scientific method of experimentation, and hence causality, in the social world of the city. The author also analyzes MTO and independent survey data from Chicago to examine trajectories of residential attainment. Although MTO provides crucial leverage for estimating neighborhood effects on individuals, as proponents rightly claim, this study demonstrates the implications imposed by a stratified urban structure and how MTO simultaneously provides a new window on the social reproduction of concentrated inequality.

The study of desistance from crime is hampered by definitional, measurement, and theoretical incoherence. A unifying framework can distinguish termination of offending from the process of desistance. Termination is the point when criminal activity stops and desistance is the underlying causal process. A small number of factors are sturdy correlates of desistance (e.g., good marriages, stable work, transformation of identity, and aging). The processes of desistance from crime and other forms of problem behavior appear to be similar. Several theoretical frameworks can be employed to explain the process of desistance, including maturation and aging, developmental, life-course, rational choice, and social learning theories. A life-course perspective provides the most compelling framework, and it can be used to identify institutional sources of desistance and the dynamic social processes inherent in stopping crime.