New

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

Urban Social Processes Workshop

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 Chairman of the Department of Sociology and the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He also serves as Senior Advisor in the Social Sciences at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Before coming to Harvard in 2003 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. Other appointments include Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation and Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Society of Criminology, Ernest Burgess Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Professor Sampson's research interests include crime, the life course, neighborhood effects, and the social structure of the city. Recent publications have focused on race/ethnicity and social mechanisms of concentrated inequality, collective efficacy and crime, immigration, the social meanings and stigma of "disorder," poverty traps, the spatial dynamics of social life, the comparative network structure of community influence, collective civic engagement, and other topics linked to the general idea of community-level social processes. This research stems from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), for which Sampson serves as Scientific Director.

Selective publications are available for downloading as listed below. Others are available on request. Posting of both published and unpublished papers for downloading is intended for educational purposes only; adherence to copyright laws is assumed.

New! The latest on Disorder, Diversity, and Crime is now available -- Read the Annual BJS Lecture, Commentaries, and Response in The British Journal of Sociology (BJS, 2009). Interviews: Watch the associated BJS podcast debate with Robert Sampson and Richard Sennett on A Brief History of Disorder and Getting to Grips with Disorder. Listen to the BBC interview and coverage of BJS Lecture -- "Urban Crime and Disorder" -- on Thinking Allowed. Read related interview on urban design and community ("Street Smarts") at Architecture Boston (Spring 2009, Vol. 12: 30-35) and listen to podcast interview about "Collective Efficacy:" Thomson-Rueters Science Watch.

The Moynihan Report Revisited: Lessons and Reflections after Four Decades, a special issue of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 2009: Vol. 621.

Recent publications:

"Neighborhood Social Capital as Differential Social Organization: Resident and Leadership Dimensions." American Behavioral Scientist, 52:11, pps. 1579-1605 (2009).

"Moving to Inequality: Neighborhood Effects and Experiments Meet Social Structure." American Journal of Sociology 114: 189-231 (2008) -- Winner of the Jane Addams Award for Best Article from the Section on Community and Urban Sociology, American Sociological Association.

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

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

Neighborhood Selection and the Social Reproduction of Concentrated Racial Inequality. Demography 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 29: 127-137 (2008).

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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 contemporary 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 groups motivated by a particular issue to act together in public 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 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 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, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and the Crime, Law, and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association.

Recent publications:

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) Associate 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) Assistant Professor, Korea University

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

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

Harvard University

Patrick Sharkey (Ph.D. 2007) RWJ Post-Doctoral Fellow, Columbia University 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)

Lydia Bean (Ph.D. 2009) Assistant Professor, Baylor University

Matthew Baggetta (Ph.D. 2009) College Fellow, Harvard University

Stacey Bosick (Ph.D. 2009) Assistant Professor, University of Colorado

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) Associate 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

David Kirk (Ph.D. 2006) Assistant Professor, University of Texas, Austin

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

Zoua Vang (Ph.D. 2008) Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of Pennsylvania

Maria Rendon(Ph.D. 2009) RWJ Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of California-Berkeley

Online Curriculum Vitae

10/02/2009

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

Staff Contact

Genevieve Butler