New in 2008

Neighborhood Effects & Social Processes

Race, Ethnicity, & Immigration

(Dis)order & Systematic Social Observation

Spatial Dynamics

Methodology

Chicago Collective Civic Participation Study

The Life Course

Graduate Students

Teaching

Robert J. Sampson

Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences
and Department Chair

Biographical Note

For further biographical information see also the National Academy of Sciences (2008): Profile of Robert J. Sampson

Robert J. Sampson is currently Chairman of the Department of Sociology and the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, where he was appointed in 2003. Before that he taught for twelve years in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago and seven years in his first faculty post at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Sampson was also a Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation from 1994-2002, and in the 1997-98 and 2002-03 academic years he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006.

Professor Sampson's research interests center on crime, deviance, and stigma; the life course; neighborhood effects; and the social organization of cities. In the area of neighborhood effects and urban studies his current work is focusing on race/ethnicity and social mechanisms of ecological inequality, the subjective meanings and implications of "disorder," spatial dynamics, the comparative network structure of community influence, collective civic engagement, and other topics linked to the general idea of community-level social processes. Much of this work stems from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), for which Sampson serves as Scientific Director. Selective publications from various components of the PHDCN and Life Course Projects are available for downloading as listed below, by substantive focus. Others are available on request or from vita. Please note that posting of both published and unpublished papers for downloading is intended for educational purposes only and that adherence to copyright laws is assumed.

New in 2008

Durable Effects of Concentrated Disadvantage on Verbal Ability among African-American Children. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: January 22, 2008. Vol. 105 (3): 845-853. See also Living in Disadvantaged Neighborhood Equivalent to Missing a Year in School.

Rethinking Crime and Immigration. Contexts (Vol. 7:28-33, 2008).

Neighborhood Selection and the Social Reproduction of Concentrated Racial Inequality. Demography (Vol. 45: 1-29, 2008).

'After-School' Chicago: Space and the City. Special Issue on "Chicago and Los Angeles: Paradigms, Schools, Archetypes, and the Urban Process." Urban Geography (Vol. 29: 127-137, 2008).

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Neighborhood Effects & Social Processes

Sampson, Robert J., Stephen Raudenbush, and Felton Earls. 1997. Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy. Science 277:918-24.

Sampson, Robert J. and Dawn Jeglum Bartusch. 1998. Legal Cynicism and (Subcultural?) Tolerance of Deviance: The Neighborhood Context of Racial Differences. Law and Society Review 32:777-804.

Sampson, Robert J. 2002. Transcending Tradition: New Directions in Community Research, Chicago Style . Criminology 40: 213-230.

Sampson, Robert J., Jeffrey D. Morenoff and Thomas Gannon-Rowley. 2002. Assessing Neighborhood Effects: Social Processes and New Directions in Research. Annual Review of Sociology 28:443-478.

Sampson, Robert J. 2003. The Neighborhood Context of Well Being. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 46 no. 3 supplement: S53-S64.

Sampson, Robert J. 2004. Networks and Neighbourhoods: The Implications of Connectivity for Thinking about Crime in the Modern City. Pp. 157-166 in Network Logic: Who Governs in an Interconnected World? edited by Helen McCarthy, Paul Miller, and Paul Skidmore. London: Demos.

Sampson, Robert J. 2004. Neighborhood and Community: Collective Efficacy and Community Safety. New Economy 11:106-113.

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Race, Ethnicity, & Immigration

Sampson, Robert J. and William Julius Wilson. 1995. Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality. In Crime and Inequality, edited by John Hagan and Ruth Peterson. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Sampson, Robert J., Jeffrey D. Morenoff, and Stephen Raudenbush. 2005. Social Anatomy of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Violence. American Journal of Public Health 95: 224-232.

Related stories: Surprising Social Factors Linked to Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Youth Violence, Population Reference Bureau (2005); Good Waves in The Boston Globe, January 1, 2006 ("Ideas" Section, p. 1); Open Doors Don't Invite Criminals: Is Increased Immigration Behind the Drop in Crime?, New York Times, March 11, 2006, p. A27 (OP-ED). Do Illegal Immigrants Burden the Justice System? NPR Morning Edition, April 27, 2006; Immigrant Effects: Latinos Nix Violence, Harvard Magazine, September-October, 2006, pp. 15-16; Do Immigrants Make us Safer?, by Eyal Press, New York Times Magazine (December 3, 2006); Mais Immigrantes, Menos Crimes, by Solange Azevedo, poca Magazine, Brazil (21 De Maio De 2007).

Just published -- See NIJ Research in Brief, Adolescents, Neighborhoods, and Violence: Recent Findings From the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhooods, by Akiva Liberman.

Sampson, Robert J. and Lydia Bean. 2006; Cultural Mechanisms and Killing Fields: A Revised Theory of Community-Level Racial Inequality. In The Many Colors of Crime: Inequalities of Race, Ethnicity and Crime in America, edited by Ruth Peterson, Lauren Krivo, and John Hagan. New York: New York University Press.

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(Dis)order & Systematic Social Observation

Sampson, Robert J. and Steve Raudenbush. 1999. Systematic Social Observation of Public Spaces: A New Look at Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods . American Journal of Sociology 105: 603-651.

Sampson, Robert J. and Steve Raudenbush. 2001. Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods: Does It Lead to Crime? Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice.

Sampson, Robert J. and Stephen W. Raudenbush. 2004. Seeing Disorder: Neighborhood Stigma and the Social Construction of "Broken Windows". Social Psychology Quarterly 67: 319-342. Winner of the 2006 Robert Park Award, Community and Urban Sociology Section, American Sociological Association. Revised version reprinted as Neighborhood Stigma and the Perception of Disorder in Focus 24: 7-11. See also Reconsidering the 'Broken Windows' Theory featured on NPR s Morning Edition, A Crack in the Broken-Windows Theory in The Washington Post, Racial Profiling Writ Large in The Atlantic Monthly, and The Cracks in "Broken Windows" in The Boston Globe.

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Spatial Dynamics

Sampson Robert J. Jeffrey Morenoff, and Felton Earls. 1999. Beyond Social Capital: Spatial Dynamics of Collective Efficacy for Children. American Sociological Review 64: 633-660.

Morenoff, Jeffrey, Robert J. Sampson, and Stephen Raudenbush. 2001. Neighborhood Inequality, Collective Efficacy, and the Spatial Dynamics of Urban Violence. Criminology 39:517-560.

Sampson, Robert J. and Jeffrey D. Morenoff. 2004. Spatial (Dis)Advantage and Homicide in Chicago Neighborhoods. In Spatially Integrated Social Science, edited by Michael Goodchild and Donald Janelle. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sampson, Robert J. and Jeffrey Morenoff. 2006. Durable Inequality: Spatial Dynamics, Social Processes, and the Persistence of Poverty in Chicago Neighborhoods. Pp. 176-203 In Poverty Traps, edited by Samuel Bowles, Steve Durlauf, and Karla Hoff. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Methodology

Raudenbush, Stephen and Robert J. Sampson. 1999. 'Ecometrics': Toward A Science of Assessing Ecological Settings, with Application to the Systematic Social Observation of Neighborhoods. Sociological Methodology 29:1-41.

Raudenbush, Stephen, Chris Johnson, and Robert J. Sampson. 2003. A Multivariate, Multilevel Rasch Model with Application to Self-Reported Criminal Behavior. Sociological Methodology 33: 169-211.

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Chicago Collective Civic Participation Study

This project aims to develop a new theoretical approach and novel empirical strategy for tackling fundamental questions about the nature and changing structure of civic life in the modern city. By integrating key strengths of the social movements and urban sociological paradigms, we recast debates on civil society by giving priority to variations across time and space in robust mechanisms of collective engagement in the form of non-routine events not initiated by the State or political professionals, but by collectivities motivated by a particular issue to act together in public (i.e., civic) space. Analyzing over 4,000 events in the Chicago metropolitan area from 1970 to 2000, we find that civic engagement is by far the dominant form of collective action and is durable over time. Although "sixties style" protest declines, we also uncover the growth of a largely overlooked hybrid that combines public claims-making with civic forms of behavior--what we call "blended social action." Furthermore, we show that dense social ties, group memberships, and neighborly exchange do not predict a greater propensity for collective action at the community level in the city of Chicago. The density of community nonprofit organizations matters instead, suggesting that declines in many forms of traditional social capital may not be as consequential for civic capacity as commonly thought. See Civil Society Reconsidered: The Durable Nature and Community Structure of Collective Civic Action, by Robert J. Sampson, Doug McAdam, Heather MacIndoe, and Simon Weffer. 2005. American Journal of Sociology Volume 111: 673-714. Commentary: Bowling Alone?: Civil Society May Not be in Such Bad Shape in Stanford Social Innovation Review (Summer 2006).

Another aim of the project is to argue that the disproportionate attention accorded the struggles of the sixties has created a stylized image of social movements that threatens to distort our understanding of popular contention, not only in earlier periods and in non-democratic contexts, but also in the contemporary U.S. This stylized view tends to equate movements with (a) disruptive protest in public settings, (b) loosely coordinated national struggles over political issues, (c) urban and/or campus based protest activities, and (d) claims-making by disadvantaged minorities. Drawing on nearly 1,000 protest events between 1970-2000 collected in the Chicago Chicago Civic Participation Study, we find the data do not support the common imagery of social movements. Since 1980 there has been a marked transformation of the movement form to the point where public protest is now largely peaceful, routine, suburban, local in nature, and initiated by the advantaged. We discuss the implications of these findings for the rise of a "movement society" in the U.S. and suggest directions for future research. See "There Will Be Fighting in the Streets:" The Distorting Lens of Social Movement Theory, by Doug McAdam, Robert Sampson, Simon Weffer, and Heather MacIndoe. 2005. Mobilization 10:1-18.

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The Life Course

Professor Sampson is engaged in a longitudinal study from birth to death of 1,000 disadvantaged men born in Boston during the Great Depression era. His first book from this project (Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life, Harvard University Press, 1993), written with John Laub, received the outstanding book award in 1994 from the American Society of Criminology, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and the Crime, Law, and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association. A second book from this project, Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70, was published in December of 2003, also from Harvard University Press. This follow-up study integrates narrative life-histories with the quantitative analysis of life-course trajectories across seven decades in the lives of formerly incarcerated and troubled adolescents. Shared Beginnings received the outstanding book award from the American Society of Criminology (2004), the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (2005), and the Crime, Law, and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association (2005). Recent articles and volumes related to this project are listed below.

Now available-- Sampson, Robert J., John H. Laub and Christopher Wimer. 2006. Does Marriage Reduce Crime? A Counterfactual Approach to Within-Individual Causal Effects. Criminology 44(3):465-508.

Developmental Criminology and Its Discontents:Trajectories of Crime from Childhood to Old Age. Special issue, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, edited by Robert J. Sampson and John H. Laub (Volume 602, November 2005). The first article from this volume can be directly downloaded from the Annals: A Life Course View of the Development of Crime.

Sampson, Robert J. and John H. Laub. 2003. Life-Course Desisters? Trajectories of Crime among Delinquent Boys Followed to Age 70. Criminology 41: 319-339. See also: Seductions of Method: Rejoinder to Nagin and Tremblay's "Developmental Trajectory Groups: Fact or Useful Fiction?" Criminology 43: 905-913.

Sampson, Robert J. and John H. Laub. 2003. Desistance from Crime over the Life Course. Pp. 295-310 in Handbook of the Life Course, edited by Jeylan T. Mortimer and Michael Shanahan. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.

Sampson, Robert J. and John H. Laub. 2005. A General Age-Graded Theory of Crime: Lessons Learned and the Future of Life-Course Criminology. In Advances in Criminological Theory, Volume 13: Testing Integrated Developmental/Life Course Theories of Offending, edited by David Farrington.

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GRADUATE STUDENTS

Chaired Dissertations, Completed:

University of Illinois

John Wooldredge (Ph.D. 1986) Professor, University of Cincinnati

Janet Lauritsen (Ph.D. 1989) Professor, University of Missouri-St.Louis

Kenna Kiger (Ph.D.1992) Associate Professor, Indiana University

University of Chicago

Robert Chaskin (Ph.D. 1996) Associate Professor, University of Chicago

Patrick J. Carr (Ph.D. 1998) Assistant Professor, Rutgers University

Jeffrey D. Morenoff (Ph.D. 2000) Associate Professor, University of Michigan

Peter K.B. St. Jean (Ph.D. 2002) Assistant Professor, SUNY Buffalo

Cheong Sun Park (Ph.D. 2002) Korea University

Andres Villarreal (Ph.D. 2002) Assistant Professor, University of Texas-Austin

Ming Wen (Ph.D. 2003) Assistant Professor, University of Utah

Harvard University

Patrick Sharkey (Ph.D. 2007) Post-Doctoral Fellow, Columbia University (RWJ Health Scholars Program) and Assistant Professor, New York University

Chris Wimer (Ph.D. 2007) Post-Doctoral Fellow, Stanford University (Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality Inequality)

Dissertation Committees, Completed:

University of Chicago

Eric Fong (Ph.D. 1993) Professor, University of Toronto

Joseph Hermanowicz (Ph.D. 1996) Associate Professor, University of Georgia

Christopher Browning (Ph.D. 1997) Associate Professor, Ohio State University

Maria Kefalas (Ph.D. 1998) Assistant Professor, Saint Joseph's University

Mignon Moore (Ph.D. 1998) Assistant Professor, UCLA

David Grazian (Ph.D. 2000) Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania

Nicole Marwell (Ph.D. 2000) Associate Professor, Columbia University

Jeffrey Timberlake (Ph.D. 2003) Assist. Prof., University of Cincinnati

Jennifer Pashup-Graham (Ph.D. 2003) Post-Doctoral Fellow, Northwestern University

Richard Lloyd (Ph.D. 2003) Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University

Janet Stamatel (Ph.D. 2004) Assistant Professor, University at Albany, State University of New York

Andrea Leverentz (Ph.D. 2006) Assistant Professor, UMass-Boston

Kim Babon (Ph.D. 2006) Assistant Professor, Wake Forest University

Harvard University

David Harding (Ph.D. 2005) Assistant Professor, University of Michigan

Online Curriculum Vitae

05/09/2008

Courses Offered This Academic Year

A Sampling of Courses Offered in Other Years

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Photo by Tony Rinaldo

Contact

617-496-9716 (Phone)
617-496-5794 (FAX)

Chair's Office- WJH 670; Research Office-WJH 470

Office Hours

By appointment only.

Staff Contact

Genevieve Butler