Robert Sampson (sociologist)

Robert J. Sampson [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/index.html Robert J. Sampson] is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and Chair of the Department of Sociology. Before joining Harvard he taught in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago for twelve years and before that the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for seven years. Sampson was 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. Sampson is a New York product from birth to Ph.D. – he grew up in Utica, New York, a city that has seen more than its share of urban woes, and attended the State University of New York for his university degrees in two other distressed cities (Buffalo and Albany). For further biographical information see the National Academy of Sciences (2008): " [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/PNAS_SampsonProfile.pdf Profile of Robert J. Sampson] ." Professor Sampson has published widely in the areas of crime and deviance, 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, immigration and crime, the meanings and implications of "disorder," spatial disadvantage, collective civic engagement, and other topics linked to the general idea of community-level social processes. Much of this work stems from the [http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/PHDCN/ Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN)] for which Sampson serves as Scientific Director.

Selected Publications by Topic

Race, Immigration & Crime

Sampson, Robert J., 2008. [http://contexts.org/articles/files/2008/01/contexts_winter08_sampson.pdf "Rethinking Crime and Immigration."] "Contexts" (Vol. 7:28-33). Sampson, Robert J., [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/2006_NYT_OpenDoors.pdf "Open Doors Don't Invite Criminals: Is Increased Immigration Behind the Drop in Crime?,"] "New York Times", March 11, 2006, p. A27 (OP-ED).

Related stories: [http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/01/01/good_waves/ "Good Waves"] in "The Boston Globe", January 1, 2006 ("Ideas" Section, p. 1); [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5365863 "Do Illegal Immigrants Burden the Justice System?"] NPR Morning Edition, April 27, 2006; [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/2006_HarvardMagazine_LatinosNix.pdf "Immigrant Effects: Latinos Nix Violence"] , "Harvard Magazine", September-October, 2006, pp. 15-16; [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/2006_NYT_Immigrants_Crime.pdf "Do Immigrants Make us Safer?"] by Eyal Press, "New York Times Magazine" (December 3, 2006).

Sampson, Robert J., Jeffrey D. Morenoff, and Stephen Raudenbush. 2005. [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/2005_AJPH.pdf "Social Anatomy of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Violence."] "American Journal of Public Health" 95: 224-232.

Sampson, Robert J. and Dawn Jeglum Bartusch. 1998. [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/1998_LSR_Bartusch.pdf "Legal Cynicism and (Subcultural?) Tolerance of Deviance: The Neighborhood Context of Racial Differences."] "Law and Society Review" 32:777-804.

Sampson, Robert J. and William Julius Wilson. 1995. [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/1995_TheoryOfRace_Wilson.pdf "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.

Inequality & Neighborhood Effects

Sampson, Robert J., 2008. "Moving to Inequality: Neighborhood Effects and Experiments Meet Structure." "American Journal of Sociology", in press.

Sampson, Robert J., 2008. [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/01_45.1Sampson.pdf "Neighborhood Selection and the Social Reproduction of Concentrated Racial Inequality."] "Demography" (Vol. 45: 1-29).

Sampson, Robert J., 2008. [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/2008_PNAS_DurableEffects.pdf "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.

Sampson, Robert J., Jeffrey D. Morenoff and Thomas Gannon-Rowley. 2002. [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/2002_ARS.pdf "Assessing Neighborhood Effects: Social Processes and New Directions in Research."] "Annual Review of Sociology" 28:443-478.

Sampson, Robert J., Stephen Raudenbush, and Felton Earls. 1997. [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/1997_Science.pdf "Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy."] "Science" 277:918-24.

(Dis)order & Systematic Social Observation

Sampson, Robert J. and Stephen W. Raudenbush. 2004. [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/2004_SPQ_Raudenbush.pdf "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.

Press related stories: [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4520866 "Reconsidering the "Broken Windows Theory"] featured on NPR s "Morning Edition", [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46381-2005Jan29.html?referrer=emailarticle "A Crack in the "Broken-Windows Theory"] in "The Washington Post" and [http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/02/19/the_cracks_in_broken_windows?p1=email_to_a_friend "The Cracks in 'Broken Windows'"] in "The Boston Globe".

Sampson, Robert J. and Steve Raudenbush. 1999. [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/1999_AJS_Raudenbush.pdf "Systematic Social Observation of Public Spaces: A New Look at Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods."] "American Journal of Sociology" 105: 603-651.

Spatial Dynamics

Sampson, Robert J., [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/2008_AfterSchoolChicago_InPress.pdf "'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).

Sampson, Robert J. and Jeffrey Morenoff. 2006. [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/2006_PTraps_Morenoff.pdf "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.

Morenoff, Jeffrey, Robert J. Sampson, and Stephen Raudenbush. 2001. [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/2001_Crim.pdf "Neighborhood Inequality, Collective Efficacy, and the Spatial Dynamics of Urban Violence."] "Criminology" 39:517-560.

Sampson Robert J. Jeffrey Morenoff, and Felton Earls. 1999. [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/1999_ASR_BeyondSC.pdf "Beyond Social Capital: Spatial Dynamics of Collective Efficacy for Children."] "American Sociological Review" 64: 633-660.

Ecometrics

Raudenbush, Stephen and Robert J. Sampson. 1999. [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/1999_SocMeth_Ecometrics.pdf "'Ecometrics': Toward A Science of Assessing Ecological Settings, with Application to the Systematic Social Observation of Neighborhoods."] "Sociological Methodology" 29:1-41.

Collective Civic Participation

The aim of the “Chicago Collective Civic Participation Project” (CCCP) is 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, this project recasts 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.

Sampson, Robert J., Doug McAdam, Heather MacIndoe, and Simon Weffer. 2005. [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/2005_AJS_CivilSociety.pdf "Civil Society Reconsidered: The Durable Nature and Community Structure of Collective Civic Action."] "American Journal of Sociology" 111: 673-714.

Sampson, Robert J., 2006. [http://www.ssireview.org/pdf/2006SU_upfront_BowlingAlone.pdf Commentary: "'Bowling Alone?': Civil Society May Not be in Such Bad Shape"] in "Stanford Social Innovation Review" (Summer 2006).

Another aim of the CCCP 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.

McAdam, Doug, Robert Sampson, Simon Weffer, and Heather MacIndoe. 2005. [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/2005_Mobilization.pdf "There Will Be Fighting in the Streets: The Distorting Lens of Social Movement Theory."] "Mobilization" 10:1-18.

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 ( [http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/SAMCRI.html "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 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 Beginning"s 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). Other selected articles and volumes related to this project: Sampson, Robert J., John H. Laub and Christopher Wimer. 2006. [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/2006_Criminology_LaubWimer.pdf "Does Marriage Reduce Crime? A Counterfactual Approach to Within-Individual Causal Effects."] "Criminology" 44(3):465-508.

[http://www.aapss.org/section.cfm/5/10/1120 "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. 2005. [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/2005_ACT_Laub.pdf "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.

Sampson, Robert J. and John H. Laub. 2003. [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/2003_Crim_Laub.pdf "Life-Course Desisters? Trajectories of Crime among Delinquent Boys Followed to Age 70."] "Criminology" 41: 319-339.

Professor Sampson's articles can be viewed and downloaded (for educational purposes only) on his [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/sampson/ Harvard] website.