Cultural mechanisms and the persistence of neighborhood violence

Sociologists have given considerable attention to identifying the neighborhood-level social-interactional mechanisms that influence outcomes such as crime, educational attainment, and health. Yet, cultural mechanisms are often overlooked in quantitative studies of neighborhood effects. This paper adds a cultural dimension to neighborhood effects research by exploring the consequences of legal cynicism. Legal cynicism refers to a cultural frame in which people perceive the law as illegitimate, unresponsive, and ill equipped to ensure public safety. The authors find that legal cynicism explains why homicide persisted in certain Chicago neighborhoods during the 1990s despite declines in poverty and declines in violence city-wide.     

The Network Structure of Crime

From theoretical physics to field‐driven anthropology, researchers are increasingly exploring how the connections among individuals, amoebas, brain cells, organizations, and institutions affect what we feel, think, and do. However, the application of social network analysis to the study of crime, deviance, and violence has arrived a bit late to this network turn in the social and behavioral science. I argue that this network turn in the social sciences be an important turning point in the study of crime and deviance, but only if taken as an opportunity to evaluate our core theoretical principles and consider new ways to understand and measure them. The goal of this essay is to take stock of the state of the field, while also providing a moment of pause to consider some fruitful ways of advancing this line of inquiry.     

An optimal property of the “(r,k ) class estimators”

The purpose of this work is to display optimal conditions, in terms of the Mean Square Error criterion of the (r,k) class estimators. This will be done with respect to the ordinary ridge repression, principal components and ordinary least squares estimate.