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Projects Funded Under the Data Resources Program Solicitation

The table below shows all of the awards made for the secondary analysis of existing data under the annual solicitation Data Resources Program: Funding for the Analysis of Existing Data since fiscal year 2006.

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Collective Efficacy and Violent Crime in Chicago Neighborhoods, 1991-1999

Grantee: Joint Centers for Justice Studies
Award Amount: $33,760
Grant Number: 2008-IJ-CX-0013

Description:

This research will assess the direct and indirect effects of collective efficacy on criminal behavior in Chicago. Neighborhood-level collective efficacy is an important theoretical and policy component of contemporary thinking about the causes of crime and role of informal and formal mechanisms of social control.

The design of this research is to reproduce and extend analyses based on a 1995 citywide community survey of 8,782 residents in 343 neighborhood clusters conducted as part of the NIJ-sponsored Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. These published analyses found that collective efficacy directly affects homicide rates, perceived violence and personal victimization; collective efficacy was also found to moderate the effects of concentrated disadvantage.

This research will use the archived data from the community survey to assess the extent to which the measures and statistical methods in these studies can be reproduced. The researchers will also extend these analyses to include expanded measures of criminal behavior, alternative definitions of neighborhood and enhanced tests of the spatial nature of criminal behavior.

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A Comprehensive Investigation of the Role of the Individuals, the Immediate Social Environment, and Neighborhoods in Trajectories of Adolescent Anti-social Behavior

Grantee: University of Cincinnati
Award Amount: $37,727
Grant Number: 2009-IJ-CX-0042

Description:

Growth-curve models have become increasingly popular in the longitudinal study of adolescent anti-social behavior. Generally, these applications have not fully considered the proximal and broad context in which development occurs. Consequently, the prospect of underspecified models may depress their substantive relevance. Of particular concern is the lack of incorporation of key covariates to illuminate the factors that condition development. Additionally, studies infrequently include community context in such models despite its importance in understanding youth development. Together, these shortcomings raise questions about the nature of the trajectories of anti-social behavior that might be observed when a full array of key interdependent conditions is included. Furthermore, a thorough accounting of these factors as they impact initial levels and longitudinal patterns of anti-social behavior will inform prevention and intervention strategies.

The proposed study draws on data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods to explore trajectories of anti-social behavior in three cohorts spanning ages 9 through 19. Cohorts 9, 12 and 15 were measured at two-year intervals across three waves. The analysis will use a multiple-cohort approach to allow for expanded age coverage of anti-social behavior trajectories. Data were collected from both youths and parents and include batteries on substance use, delinquency, peers and the home environment. These longitudinal observations are also nested in Chicago neighborhoods, facilitating contextual analysis of youth behavior based on an assortment of factors (e.g., collective efficacy, neighborhood structure) and providing a unique opportunity to expand the understanding of adolescent behavioral trajectories beyond the individual level. The initial sample sizes are 2,343 youths and 80 neighborhood clusters.

The proposed study will use multilevel latent growth-curve models to examine the nature of trajectories in adolescent anti-social behavior (and their variance) both within and across neighborhoods. First, unconditional models for substance use and delinquency will be specified and tested to describe their respective longitudinal patterns in adolescence (Objective 1). Subsequently, key individual, family and peer influence covariates will be added to the models. Neighborhood-to-neighborhood variation in trajectories will then be examined by way of multilevel modeling procedures. If sufficient neighborhood variation in trajectories is identified, community-level characteristics will then be incorporated as potential explanatory factors. Together, the proposed set of analytic procedures, drawing on individual, family and community covariates, allows for a holistic assessment of the effects of these influences on longitudinal patterns of adolescent anti-social behavior (Objective 2). This will in turn provide information for discussion around the prospects for early prevention and intervention.

It is expected that the proposed project will take two years to complete. Dissemination of key findings will take place within one year following project completion and, in addition to interim and final reporting to the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), will include at least two conference presentations and accompanying manuscripts to be submitted to peer review journals. All data, codebook and data set construction syntax files will be made available to NIJ within the time denoted in the program solicitation. Syntax files related to the assessment of measurement items and scales and MPlus input files used with the latent growth-curve models will be made available via the investigator's faculty Web site and referenced in the reports, presentations and manuscripts noted above.

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Determinants of Chicago Neighborhood Homicide Trends, 1980-2000

Grantee: Florida State University
Award Amount: $34,789
Grant Number: 2008-IJ-CX-0019

Description:

One of the most important social changes in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s was the dramatic increase and subsequent decrease in crime, particularly violent crime, in large cities. For example, the homicide rate in Chicago nearly tripled between 1965 and 1992, then declined by more than 50 percent through 2005. Is this trend representative of all areas in the city? The general purpose of the proposed project is to examine homicide trends in Chicago neighborhoods from 1980 to 2000 using three data sources available from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research and the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data. Drawing on the social disorganization and concentrated disadvantage literature, this study will use growth-curve modeling and semiparametric group-based trajectory modeling to: 1) assess neighborhood variation in homicide trends; 2) identify the particular types of homicide trajectory that Chicago neighborhoods follow; 3) assess whether structural characteristics of neighborhoods influence homicide trends and trajectories; and 4) determine the extent to which the influence of structural characteristics is mediated by neighborhood levels of collective efficacy. This project extends prior research by not only describing the homicide trends and trajectories of Chicago neighborhoods but also identifying the neighborhood characteristics that directly and indirectly influence those trends.

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The Effects of Prosecution on Violence Between Intimate Partners

Grantee: Joint Centers for Justice Studies
Award Amount: $34,425
Grant Number: 2006-IJ-CX-0005

Description:

This research will systematically determine the extent to which earlier findings about effectiveness of criminal sanctions on repeat offending can be reproduced from the archived data. This research builds on existing analyses to construct new analyses that will extend understanding of the effects of prosecution, conviction and sentence severity on crime rates. The researchers will construct new variables to measure case disposition and the role of an offender's stake in conformity. In addition, the researchers will explore the use of propensity scores to address analytical biases introduced by the processing of criminal cases.

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Expanding the Scope of Research on Recent Crime Trends

Grantee: Curators of the University of Missouri
Award Amount: $35,000
Grant Number: 2008-IJ-CX-0014

Description:

The now well-known substantial shifts in crime rates observed in the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s were largely unanticipated. They have stimulated a deep curiosity among researchers, policymakers, the media and the general public about precisely what happened and why it happened. This curiosity has stimulated a long and creative list of ideas about why crime rates probably took their observed path. However, there have been surprisingly few comprehensive empirical assessments and there is little consensus about the factors that mattered most. The extant research on recent crime trends has focused on a narrow subset of the many factors thought to be potentially relevant, and coupled with substantial variation across studies in model specification, units of analysis and analytical strategies, this has impeded the accumulation of a systematic body of scientifically generated knowledge from which a more vivid portrait of recent crime trends might emerge. The proposed project would advance understanding and produce valuable data and results for policymakers and others by (1) building a more complete data infrastructure and (2) conducting a comprehensive and systematic analysis of each of the major hypotheses emphasized in the literature across multiple geographic units (states, metropolitan areas, counties and cities).

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Exploring the Effects of Incarceration on the Safety and Well-Being of Families of Inmates Using the National Crime Victimization Survey

Grantee: City University of New York
Award Amount: $34,997
Grant Number: 2006-IJ-CX-0007

Description:

Traditionally, the wisdom of incarceration has been assessed in terms of the recidivism of individual offenders or reductions in aggregate crime rates. More recently the number of people incarcerated and the clustering of that incarceration in inner-city black populations raise the prospect that incarceration may be undermining less coercive institutions of social control, such as families and communities. However, these allegations that incarceration undermines less coercive institutions of social control are largely speculative. Although a small body of research has attempted to document the effects of incarceration on less coercive institutions of social control, this work is limited in a number of ways. Specifically, these studies are often cross-sectional, conducted on small groups of families with no comparison group of families not experiencing incarceration. The result is very weak evidence for an effect of incarceration on families. The proposed study takes advantage of changes in the National Crime Victimization Survey to identify a relatively large and representative sample of households with members who are returning from correctional institutions. The survey measures indicators of family well-being over time and compares those indicators with control groups of similar households who have not (yet) experienced incarceration. All of these factors should result in more definitive evidence of the causal effect of incarceration on family well-being.

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Exposure to Intimate Partner Violence: Gendered and Contextual Effects on Adolescent Interpersonal Violence, Drug Use and Mental Health Outcomes

Grantee: University of South Carolina Research Foundation
Award Amount: $37,179
Grant Number: 2009-IJ-CX-0043

Description:

Millions of children and adolescents are exposed to intimate partner violence (IPV) between their parents or caretakers each year. Previous research has shown that exposure to IPV has detrimental effects on children's emotional and behavioral well-being and increases the likelihood of various problems related to violence, drug use and mental health disorders. However, such research has been limited by the use of small and nonrepresentative samples, retrospective or cross-sectional data, a reliance on parental reports, a lack of control variables and, most importantly, a failure to examine contextual influences on the effects of IPV exposure among youths and whether these effects are stronger among males or females. The proposed study attempts to address these limitations using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN). It will extend existing knowledge by: a) drawing on data from a large number of male and female youths who are representative of the general population; b) examining longitudinal data; c) utilizing parental and youth self-reports of violence, drug use and mental health problems; d) controlling for multiple confounding variables; e) employing social disorganization theory to examine contextual effects on youth violence, drug use, and mental health outcomes; and f) assessing gender differences in these effects.

The researchers address three questions:

1. What are the direct effects of IPV exposure on youths' interpersonal violence, drug use and mental health problems (e.g., posttraumatic stress disorder)?
2. What are the main effects of neighborhood characteristics (e.g., concentrated disadvantage or collective efficacy) on neighborhood rates of youth violence, drug use and mental health problems?
3. Does the effect of IPV exposure vary across neighborhoods? If so, is the relationship between IPV exposure and youth violence, drug use and mental health problems conditioned by neighborhood characteristics?

Due to the multilevel nature of the PHDCN dataset, hierarchical linear modeling will be used to estimate the effects of IPV exposure on youths' violence, drug use and mental health problems; the direct effects of neighborhood-level characteristics on these problems; and the conditioning influence of neighborhoods on the relationship between IPV exposure and youths' outcomes. Separate analyses for 1,172 male and 1,152 female youths will be conducted to examine gender differences in these relationships. The study will use data from the first, second and third waves of the PHDCN and will include information from the Community Survey and 1990 U.S. Census portions of the dataset (each representing 80 neighborhood clusters) as well as the Longitudinal Cohort Study (focusing on youths in cohorts 9, 12 and 15). Prevalence measures of each outcome will be examined using Bernoulli models, while incidence measures will be examined with negative binomial models.

A better understanding of the contextual effects of witnessing family violence on youth outcomes will both inform the theoretical understanding of adolescent development and suggest opportunities to reduce problem outcomes via prevention- and intervention-oriented mechanisms. Aside from the final project report, three journal articles and two conference papers will be produced.

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Gender, Mental Illness and Crime

Grantee: Portland State University
Award Amount: $34,999
Grant Number: 2007-IJ-CX-0004

Description:

There is a growing set of concerns and practices regarding gender differences in crime and delinquency, especially the role of gender in the relationships between mental illness (particularly depression), substance abuse and criminal conduct. These concerns and practices are based largely on anecdotal evidence and have not been subject to rigorous testing; the proposed research seeks to address this limitation. The results have direct implications for future criminal justice practices and will speak to the necessity of models with a gendered focus.

Goals and Objectives: This project will demonstrate the gendered relationship between mental illness, substance use and crime. This study will identify (1) the gendered effects of depression and substance abuse on self-reported criminal behavior, (2) the gendered effect of mental health/substance abuse treatment on crime, and (3) the gendered effect of interactions with the criminal justice system on current depression and substance abuse.

Research Subjects: Subjects are from a nationally representative sample of 67,760 respondents to the 2004 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, given to members of the noninstitutionalized U.S. civilian population aged 12 or older.

Methods: Logistic regression models estimating the odds of crime and mental illness will be conducted for male and female respondents; z-tests will then be used to formally test for gender differences. Statistical analyses will focus on explaining behavior in the most recent 12 months, focusing attention to current factors in the respondents' lives that explain their crime and mental illness. The models will include a measure of deviant behavior from the previous years to control for unobserved individual heterogeneity. The findings coming from this project will therefore provide strong evidence regarding the role of gender in affecting crime and mental illness.

Relevance to Public Policy, Practice and Theory: These findings promise to be of particular interest to criminal justice and mental health policymakers to enhance crime prevention efforts, improve mental health interventions, and design justice practices that reduce recidivism and promote pro-social behavior. Results will be disseminated through at least two presentations at national conferences in sociology and criminology; publication in journals focusing on crime, mental health, and criminal justice policy; and the preparation of reports for inclusion in the Consensus Project on Criminal Justice and Mental Health. Research briefs and presentations will be facilitated by Portland State University's Center for Health and Social Inequality Research and the Oregon Health Research and Evaluation Collaborative.

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The Impact of Spatial Autocorrelation on Factors That Predict Intimate Partner Violence Arrest Decisions

Grantee: University of Pennsylvania
Award Amount: $34,518
Grant Number: 2007-IJ-CX-0005

Description:

Nationally, approximately half of all reports to police for alleged intimate partner violence (IPV) result in arrest; 80 percent of those arrested are male, and both parties are arrested in 5 percent of arrest cases.[1] At the scene, police make decisions regarding whether or whom to arrest. The purpose of this study is to use multivariate and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) spatial autocorrelation techniques to examine the extent to which incident-level, local police organization and community-level factors affect police arrest decisions.

This study will assess differences in arrest outcomes among a number of comparisons rarely found in the IPV literature, including male versus female offenders, married versus nonmarried (dating) relationships, and current versus former relationships. It represents a unique collaboration of experts in criminal justice, IPV, GIS, statistics and epidemiology to help inform police interventions along with criminal justice and social service system responses to IPV. Despite the known dramatic increase in the recent number of women arrested, current interventions have been designed around an antiquated paradigm of male offender and female victim. Using data from three large national databases — the National Incident-Based Reporting System, the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics, and the Area Resource File — we will apply spatial autocorrelation methods to understand the incident, victim and community factors that have influenced these changes. Furthermore, our outcome measure will extend beyond the typical binary arrest or no arrest by disaggregating cases by single or dual arrest and sex of arrestee.[2]

Findings and conclusions will serve to inform police policy and practices, as well as social service interventions in response to reported cases of IPV, and will lay the groundwork for further scientific inquiry. Specificity of the characteristics of the people involved in IPV cases — as victims, offenders or arrestees — will be useful in designing interventions for each of these populations. The results of this study will be used to inform generalizability of another NIJ-funded project to assess the impact of victim participation in criminal justice intervention on victim health and safety.

[1] Based on data from the 2002 National Incident-Based Reporting System.
[2] Due to the low percentage of "homosexual relationships" in the dataset, this study will look exclusively at IPV within heterosexual relationships.

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Innovation Diffusion Channels and Community Policing: The Impact of Institutional Forces on Organizational Practice

Grantee: Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Award Amount: $22,650
Grant Number: 2007-IJ-CX-0003

Description:

Each year, criminal justice researchers and policymakers produce hundreds of publications and presentations describing strategies effective at preventing and/or controlling crime and disorder. This knowledge is essential in a period where evidence-based policies and practices are increasingly emphasized. Of great importance for evidence-based policy is how these effective strategies are transmitted from one jurisdiction to the next so that they are widely adopted. Diffusion research suggests that the spread of innovation will occur only if would-be adopters become familiar with the emergent strategies. Unfortunately, empirical research examining channels of communication capable of spreading knowledge of innovative programs is lacking. Instead, research has typically focused on the factors that give rise to the need for organizational change rather than factors that influence the content of that change.

The proposed research seeks to enhance our understanding of channels used to diffuse innovation by assessing their influence in organizational change. These channels — journals and government publications, accreditation criteria, other agencies, grants, community and government pressures, academic courses/seminars and professional associations — are studied within the context of community policing reforms. Using existing data collected from more than 440 local law enforcement agencies, the relative importance of communication channels is assessed along with commonly studied factors of organizational change such as organizational size, jurisdiction crime rates and community social disorganization. The results are most valuable for researchers and policymakers as they identify channels that are most salient with practitioners making decisions about organizational change. Such knowledge will allow for more strategic dissemination of research and enhance the prospects for change in criminal justice practice.

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Mental Health and Violent Offending in Chicago Youth: A Multilevel Approach

Grantee: University of Texas at Dallas
Award Amount: $37,490
Grant Number: 2009-IJ-CX-0007

Description:

A large number of national and local studies point toward the co-occurrence of violent behaviors with mental health issues in youths. There are critical social and policy implications for identifying the causes and correlates of violence, factors that may temporally predict the onset and persistence of violence across various developmental stages over the life course. The early identification of mental illness in youngsters is an important goal for researchers who are trying to determine if a causal relationship exists between various forms of mental disorder and offending. Such research has the potential to contribute substantively to our understanding of the etiology of violent pathways and, in turn, guide best practices on a public policy level as governments and communities work to promote pro-social outcomes for at-risk youths and their families.

The proposed multilevel study will examine the role of various mental health problems in future self-reported violence among Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) youths, when controlling for various community, family and individual risk factors. In particular, this study will be one of the first to use Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM)-oriented scales of mental health problems, which include age- and gender-appropriate taxonomic measures for Anxiety, Affective, Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity, Somatic, and Oppositional Defiant Problems. These DSM-oriented scales allow for distinctions between normal, borderline and clinical levels of mental health problems compared to normative samples. Restricted secondary data will be used from both the Community Survey and Wave 1 and 2 data from the Longitudinal Cohort Study of the PHDCN for youths who were at least 7 years old (cohorts 6-18) at Wave 1. This multilevel study builds on preliminary analyses by the authors that have found robust and consistent relationships between DSM-oriented problems and violence in PHDCN youths. Specifically, the researchers propose a multilevel hierarchical linear model that incorporates individual-level DSM-oriented problems while controlling for other relevant family and neighborhood covariates of anti-social outcomes. If these DSM-oriented problems remain as significant predictors of violence in a multilevel model after controlling for family- and neighborhood-level variables, the researchers will further explore the interactions, including cross-level, between these indicators.

Thus, this study will explore the interconnectedness between these multiple levels of predictors and offer insights into how local, state and national resources might best be used in regard to violence intervention and prevention programs. In conjunction with other studies, this work will lend important knowledge about which mental health difficulties are most problematic among urban youths; how other individual, family and neighborhood risk factors affect the magnitude of mental health consequences of violence; and which components play a greater part in violent behavior over various developmental stages. It is anticipated that this project will begin in January 2010 and conclude in December 2010 and yield one to three reports/papers that will prove valuable to researchers, practitioners and policymakers. During the term of the grant, results will be presented to criminal justice researchers and practitioners at a national conference, a summary report will be prepared for NIJ's Research in Brief series, one to three journal articles are anticipated and at least one brief report will be submitted to outlets visible to practitioners and policymakers. The data will be submitted as required for archiving with the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data. Lastly, a final substantive report will be submitted to NIJ.

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Pretrial Release of Latino Defendants

Grantee: Pretrial Justice Institute
Award Amount: $34,850
Grant Number: 2007-IJ-CX-0002

Description:

The decision to detain or release a defendant before trial has ramifications for the person standing trial. Persons who are denied release are more likely be convicted of a felony, be sentenced to jail versus fined, and sentenced to prison versus jail, even after controlling for other legally relevant sentencing factors. (Demuth, 2003; Spohn, 2000). To date, research that considers what specific factors affect the probability of pretrial release has focused primarily on individual-level defendant characteristics (Demuth, 2003; Demuth and Steffensmeier, 2004). In this application, Pretrial Services Resource Center (PSRC) proposes to introduce new predictors of pretrial decision-making at the county level (e.g., court caseload rates, financial resources of the prosecutor's office, prosecutor screening of cases, local jail capacity), which criminal justice policymakers have not fully considered up to now.

The problems with previous studies of pretrial release decisions, however, are more extensive than just nonlimited use of relevant jurisdiction-level controls. In truth, the essential logic of the original racial threat hypothesis proposed by Blalock (1967), which supports the rationale for most studies of how race and ethnicity affect criminal justice outcomes, has never been operationalized at the proper unit of analysis in pretrial release decision studies. Blalock suggested that in places where minority groups are growing rapidly, minority members are more likely to be subject to adverse outcomes.

For this reason, this study of the country's largest and fastest growing minority group, PSRC proposes to examine the variation in the effect of Latino ethnicity on the likelihood of pretrial release as a function of the rate of increase of Latinos in the county in which the state court is located. Research questions include: 1) Are Latino defendants less likely to receive pretrial releases than non-Latino defendants, and 2) Are Latino defendants in counties where the Latino population is rapidly increasing less likely to receive pretrial releases than Latino defendants in counties where the Latino population is not rapidly increasing?

We propose using the following data:

• 1990-2002 State Court Processing Statistics Database
• 1990-2001 National Prosecutor Survey (NPS) Databases
• Annual Survey of Jails: Jurisdiction Level Data
• U.S. Department of the Census Data

Logistic and ordinary least squares analyses will be conducted within a hierarchical linear model allowing separation of county-level context effects from individual-level effects. Study findings will help inform policy and practice discussions about potential ethnic bias during the pretrial release decision process.

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Protective Behaviors of Student Victims of Bullying: A Rare Events Analysis of the 2007 School Crime Supplement

Grantee: American Institutes for Research in the Behavioral Sciences
Award Amount: $38,000
Grant Number: 2009-IJ-CX-0107

Description:

Most research on school bullying has focused on its prevalence, characteristics of bullies and victims, and programmatic responses undertaken by schools to prevent or reduce its occurrence. Although the public, national media and case studies implicate bullying as a factor in cases of school violence, little research to date examines the self-protective behaviors of bullying victims. This raises the question: Do victims of bullying take measures to protect themselves, even though these measures may endanger other students at school? In addition, do their choices of protective behaviors vary by the type of bullying they endure? The researchers propose to use data from the 2007 School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey to examine the self-protective behaviors exhibited by victims of bullying. Specific protective behaviors to be examined include self-reported weapon carrying, fighting, avoidance behaviors and truancy. Using a little-utilized analysis technique called rare events analysis, the researchers propose that, controlling for relevant student and school characteristics, victims of bullying will be more likely to adopt self-

protective behaviors that further endanger school safety and school climate. In addition, the adoption of these behaviors will be examined by the type of bullying, direct or indirect, endured by the victim. Caution is warranted in that these data are cross-sectional and one cannot infer causality from the analysis. However, policy implications are promising in that if a relationship is found between lower-level victimization, such as bullying, and more serious behaviors that endanger students and schools, targeted programmatic efforts toward bullying prevention might play a more vital role in school violence prevention than previously thought.

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A Spatio-Temporal Assessment of Exposure to Neighborhood Violence

Grantee: University of Maryland, College Park
Award Amount: $34,997
Grant Number: 2008-IJ-CX-0011

Description:

The past two decades have been marked by a renewed interest in studying the effects of neighborhood settings on social phenomena such as criminality, yet the bulk of “neighborhood effects” research examines the impact of neighborhood context cross sectionally. From a public policy standpoint, it is critical to understand whether the effects of neighborhood context are situational or whether they operate via the accumulation of exposure to neighborhood-level risks and opportunities. The proposed study examines the cumulative consequences of being exposed to deleterious neighborhood conditions and uses an integrated life-course, neighborhood-effects framework to investigate the consequences of exposure to neighborhood violence for a sample of youths.

This proposed study is guided by two specific objectives: (1) To describe and compare exposure to neighborhood violence throughout childhood and adolescence across race and ethnicity; (2) To estimate the effect of exposure to neighborhood violence on youth mental health, both internalizing problems (somatic problems, withdrawal and depression/anxiety) and externalizing problems (delinquency and aggression). With a time-varying measure of exposure to neighborhood violence, the researchers seek to understand how transitioning in and out of violent neighborhoods relates to youth mental health, including racial and ethnic differences in mental health. If the study determines that the mental health consequences of long-term exposure to violent neighborhoods cannot be immediately remedied through residential mobility, then public resources may be better spent on revitalizing violent neighborhoods in contrast to programs aimed at spurring residential mobility away from such neighborhoods.

To achieve the outlined research objectives, the researchers will perform a series of descriptive and inferential analyses on a merged data repository that includes the following data sets: 1) the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) Longitudinal Cohort Study, 2) the 1994-1995 PHDCN Community Survey, 3) the 1990 and 2000 U.S. Census, and 4) 1994-2002 violent crime data obtained from the Chicago Police Department. To address objective 1, the researchers will construct covariate-adjusted increment-decrement period life tables to estimate racial and ethnic inequality in the duration of children's exposure to neighborhood violence throughout childhood, net of family-level covariates. To address objective 2, the researchers will utilize multilevel regression models to estimate the effects of neighborhood violent crime rates on youth mental health, as indicated by both internalizing and externalizing behaviors. Regression models will include controls for relevant person-, family- and neighborhood-level covariates.

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Spreading the Wealth: The Effect of the Distribution of Income and Race/Ethnicity Across Households and Neighborhoods on City/Crime Trajectories

Grantee: Regents of the University of California
Award Amount: $35,000
Grant Number: 2008-IJ-CX-0020

Description:

This study estimates the trajectories of crime rates of cities in seven similar counties that have seen dramatic population growth since World War II: Orange County, Calif.; the San Diego area; the Silicon Valley area; the Denver area; the Miami area; the Dallas area; and the Las Vegas area. Employing cities from counties at a similar developmental stage will provide more appropriate comparisons of these trajectories of crime.

A key test of this study is the effect the race and class composition of a city has on its trajectory of crime. Specifically, this study teases out the effects of the overall level of these measures in cities, the distribution of these measures across households in cities and the spatial distribution of these measures across neighborhoods in cities on city crime trajectories. This approach allows for disentangling competing perspectives. The political perspective argues that the overall inequality in a city increases crime by reducing the political will to address underlying disorder in the community. In contrast, the social distance/social disorganization model posits that the amount of inequality in neighborhoods is important for driving crime and its increase over time. Likewise, this study tests whether a simple measure of the overall level of poverty in the city affects crime or whether highly disadvantaged neighborhoods with high levels of poverty have a nonlinear effect on crime.

This study also attempts to disentangle two robust findings in the literature: studies using both cities and neighborhoods (such as census tracts) as the unit of analysis have found a positive relationship between racial/ethnic heterogeneity and crime rates. By accounting for the spatial distribution of such heterogeneity in cities, this study tests whether this effect occurs at the tract level or the city level.

The study uses latent trajectory models to estimate these trajectories of city crime rates as well as the determinants of these trajectories. Separate trajectories will be estimated over the 1970-1980, 1980-1990, 1990-2000, and 2000-2005 periods. This allows testing not only for the effects of these structural measures on city crime trajectories but also for changes in these effects over this 35-year period.

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The Structural and Cultural Dynamics of Neighborhood Violence

Grantee: University of Maryland, College Park
Award Amount: $34,912
Grant Number: 2008-IJ-CX-0012

Description:

Ethnographic research has explored the thesis that neighborhood structural disadvantage and structural disorganization lead to a form in cultural disorganization that ultimately makes violence more likely. These studies have consistently found remarkable variability of cultural codes and systems within poor urban neighborhoods, in particular, the seemingly paradoxical coexistence of law-abiding and deviant cultural systems. However, little quantitative work has explored the argument that neighborhoods characterized by concentrated disadvantage and social isolation give rise to cultural adaptations that legitimate the use of violent behavior.

This study seeks to fill this void in research on violence by modeling the effects of neighborhood structural and cultural factors on violence across the entire spatial context of Chicago, paying particular attention to whether cultural factors like legal cynicism mediate the association between neighborhood structural factors and violence. This study advances previous research by incorporating both a structural and a cultural framework to explain neighborhood violence. The researchers anticipate that a number of policy-relevant implications will surface from this study. In particular, the researchers expect that the study findings will offer insight as to whether revitalizing the structural conditions of a disadvantaged neighborhood will lead to a form of cultural reorganization and just how long revitalization efforts must be sustained in order to better both structural and cultural conditions.

To achieve the outlined research objectives, the researchers will perform a series of analyses on a merged data repository that includes the following data sets: 1) the 1994-1995 Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods Community Survey, 2) the 1990 U.S. Census, and 3) 1990-2000 homicide and aggravated assault data obtained from the Chicago Police Department. Analyses will follow three paths. First, the researchers will assess whether neighborhood conditions breed cultural adaptations to those conditions by modeling legal cynicism as a function of neighborhood structural conditions and social organization. Second, the researchers will examine whether cultural adaptations make violence more likely in some neighborhoods than in others by examining the associations between legal cynicism and homicide and between legal cynicism and aggravated assault. Third, to determine if legal cynicism makes all types of violence more likely or just certain forms, the researchers will compare whether the neighborhood predictors of gang versus nongang homicide are the same.

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Unpacking the Influence of Neighborhood Context and Anti-social Propensity on Violent Victimization of Children and Adolescents in Chicago

Grantee: University of Florida, Gainesville
Award Amount: $36,185
Grant Number: 2009-IJ-CX-0041

Description:

The primary goal of this research is to examine how neighborhood contexts, in conjunction with individual anti-social propensities (e.g., low self-control), impact the likelihood that children and adolescents will become victims of violence. Although much research has been conducted on community risk factors, little research has been conducted on how anti-social traits predictive of youthful violent offending also contribute to their violent victimization. This research will merge macro and micro theoretical frameworks, social disorganization and self-control theory, to create a more precise statistical portrait of violent victimization among youth. This proposal has several objectives. First, net of individual characteristics, do youths living in disadvantaged and disintegrating neighborhoods experience more violent victimization than their counterparts living in more affluent, cohesive neighborhoods? Second, and regardless of neighborhood factors, does children's level of anti-social propensity affect their likelihood of becoming a victim of violent crime? Finally, does the relationship between children's and adolescents' anti-social propensity and violent victimization vary as a function of the types of neighborhoods they live? For instance, are disadvantaged neighborhoods a risk factor for children with high self-control?

Research has long focused on the perpetrators of aggression and violence in isolation from the targets of these actions. But research has begun to reveal the processes responsible for culminating in the victimization of individuals, such as community context factors and personal traits of the victims, i.e., their level of self-control or anti-social propensities. The joint contributions of contextual and personal risk factors are not as well understood because potentially important personal traits have only recently emerged in the victimization literature. This research seeks to better understand the factors and processes that account for why some youths frequently experience aggression and violence while others do not.

The researchers plan to use three waves of longitudinal data collected on three child and adolescent cohorts (9-, 12- and 15-year-old cohorts) residing in 80 neighborhoods from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. Data are derived from self and primary caregiver reports as well as neighborhood structural and social characteristics taken from the U.S. Census and a community survey of neighborhoods, respectively. Multilevel statistical techniques that appropriately take into account the nesting of individuals within neighborhoods will be used. The analytic framework will allow the researchers to assess the independent and interactive effects of neighborhood conditions and individual-level measures of criminological constructs on victimization outcomes.

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What Promotes Resilience in Youths Exposed to Violence: A Multilevel Analysis

Grantee: WestEd
Award Amount: $38,000
Grant Number: 2009-IJ-CX-0103

Description:

Researchers have repeatedly noted substantial variation in the functioning of youths exposed to high rates of community violence. Indeed, not all children exposed to violence succumb to adversity. Exposure to high rates of community violence may increase one's risk of psychosocial, behavioral and academic problems, but it is not determinative. The majority of youth witnesses to and victims of community violence subsequently develop into healthy adults, against all odds. The impetus of this multidisciplinary study is that developmentally appropriate assets are available to these youths along the way, so that they manage not only to survive but to thrive. The main research question is: What are these resources and relationships that youths are able to tap into to tip the balance from vulnerability in favor of resilience? Few longitudinal studies have empirically tested the significance of external developmental assets, deemed fundamental for positive development of all youths, in building resilience among at-risk youths.

This strengths-based study will utilize data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods  Longitudinal Cohort Study of cohorts 12-18, the community surveys from 1994-95 and 2000-01, and the 2000 U.S. Census to better understand the extraordinary lives and protective factors for those youths who escape adversity within the context of violence and become caring, competent adults. Using multilevel theory and methods, this prospective study aims to explain the variation in behavioral resilience over time among urban adolescents differentially exposed to community violence as a function of select developmental assets and accounting for individual- and neighborhood-level risks. Going further up the social ecology, the study also examines whether neighborhood-level collective efficacy overall and via interaction with assets builds behavioral resilience. Evidence documenting the strengths and extraordinary lives lived by most urban youths will provide insights into what works, hopefully change societal perceptions of urban youths for the better, and inform the ways policies and programs are practiced.