CJ 8305/605 Spring 08CJ
Advanced Statistics in Criminal Justice:
Questions to Accompany Readings
How to use the questions. I recommend you do this. a) Read the questions for an article first. b) Read the article. c) Re-read the article. d) Write answers. I am not going to ask you to hand in your answers but your should expect to be called on for any reading due for that class.
If you read an article but are so confused you cannot even begin to answer the questions then write down what your questions are and bring that with you to class.
Questions linked to readings: DATE is the week the readings are DUE
1/29/08
SAMPSON: Summarize in your own words the limitations of current neighborhood
effects research. What, in your own words, is the selection problem? What, in
your own words, are compositional effects
MORENOFF: in your own words, and just highlighting, explain how neighborhood
factors affect birth weight outcomes, and how/why social dynamics are relevant.
HLML00CC: answer the questions that go with the regression models.
2/5/08
SAMPSON (2003) In your own words, summarize his version of collective efficacy
theory. Think about the self reported health status outcome in the PHMC file. Can you outline a model of how it would be affected by collective efficacy
and/or local social ties?
THORNDIKE: in no more than two sentences, what did his article show?
LISKA: What are the implications of his perspective FOR THEORY when we are looking at the
percent of variance of an outcome that is at Level 2?
2/12/08
SAMPSON (2003) In the City and Community article, Sampson says that Dear and
other "new" LA school urbanists, have mis-characterized the Chicago School. In
what way have they mis-characterized it?
SAMPSON (2002) In the Criminology article, Sampson says one attribute of current
Chicago school work is "a relational concern with variablility in terms of
social organization as opposed to population attributes." Translate into
English, and give an example.; What does Sampson mean when he says "Social ties
thus present a challenge for thinking about crime"? Do YOU think there is a
similar challenge when we think about crime as a predictor of local ties or
local social climate or health status?
QUESTIONS BELOW NOT YET FINALIZED
2/19/08
TAYLOR ET AL (1985). What effects do we see of neighborhood crime rate on local
sentiments? Is this an ecological or a contextual analysis?
DUNCAN ET AL (2003) Comment on the three level ANOVA shown in Table II,
decomposing collective efficacy into the individual, family, and neighborhood
components, given what you know based on the Liska article.
2/26/08
GIBSON ET AL. (2002) In your own words, describe how Gibson et al.'s model
links social climate and fear of crime.
TAYLOR (2002) Label the social variables in the PHMC file using the terms provided in
this article; do NOT use the term "collective efficacy"
3/4/08
Quiz prep
3/11/08
Break
3/18/08
SAMPSON AND BARTUSCH: What variables do they use for "legal cynicism" and what
do you feel about that label for those variables? How about the variables and
the label "tolerance of deviance?" What are the neighborhood level correlates of
tolerance for deviance and how do we interpret those? How about legal cynicism?
3/25/08
DUNCAN ET AL (2003) What have you learned about the Level 2 and Level 3
predictors of collective efficacy?; summarize in your own words.
ROBINSON ET AL. What have you learned about the the CAUSES vs. the CORRELATES of
emotional fear? Block satisfaction?
4/1/08
4/8/08
4/15/08
Rodriguez: What is the outcome? Does she assume the effects of race/ethnicity
are constant? Why not? What are the mechanisms underlying the hypothesized
differential impacts? What are your reactions to this reasoning? How does the
racial threat hypothesis bear on this research? How does juvenile race and
community SES connect? Can you draw her three hypotheses in a causal model? What
are your reactions to her reasoning at the end of the first para on 637? What
would you need to get at this directly? Reactions to her use of zip codes? What
is the outcome variable? What community variables does she include? Does she
have crime data? Last sentence on p. 640: your reactions to her group mean
centering of the L1 predictors? Implications for separating out compositional
vs. community effects? Do you understand Table 2? p 647, 4 lines above
table: is the term "mediate" used correctly? Did the effects of crime
(delinquency of Latino detention work out as expected?
Garcia et al?: What is the outcome? What was the decisionmaking followed in deciding how to treat the outcome variable? How did crime affect the outcome? Because L1 predictors were group mean centered, can we be sure the crime rate impacts or the status impacts are truly neighborhood effects? What kinds of processes do you think are going on with the impacts of spatially lagged trust in some models? Can you explain to me everything going on in tables 2 and 3?
4/22/08