NCJ Number
245282
Journal
Criminology Volume: 51 Issue: 1 Dated: February 2013 Pages: 1-31
Date Published
February 2013
Length
31 pages
Annotation
The author presents a theoretical framework and analytic strategy for the study of place as a fundamental context in criminology, with a focus on neighborhood effects.
Abstract
The author's approach builds on the past 15 years of research from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and from a recent book unifying the results. The author argues that "ecometrics" can be applied at multiple scales, and the author elaborates core principles and guiding hypotheses for five problems: 1) legacies of inequality and developmental neighborhood effects; 2) race, crime, and the new diversity; 3) cognition and context, above all the social meaning of disorder; 4) the measurement and sources of collective efficacy in a cosmopolitan world; and 5) higher order structures beyond the neighborhood that arise in complex urban systems. Although conceptually distinct, these hard problems are interdependent and ultimately linked to a frontier in criminology: contextual causality. (Published Abstract)