Category Archives: Sociology

Seeing murder as part of a series of social exchanges

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Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic quotes a summary of a recent study in American Sociological Review. The study views murders as part of a larger system of social exchanges between gangs:

In a remarkable 2010 study published in the American Journal of Sociology, academic Andrew Papachristos took these findings to their logical conclusion and conceptualised each murder over a three-year period in Chicago as a social interaction between groups. Surprisingly, the pattern of homicides resembled an exchange of gifts. One gang ‘presents’ a murder to another, and that group must reciprocate the ‘gift’ or risk losing their social status in the criminal underworld. From this perspective, murder is perhaps the purest of social exchanges as the individual is left in no position to reciprocate on his own.

An interesting take that limits the role of individuals in the process.

Would this apply to other crimes as well?

Defining an emergency in 9-1-1 calls

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NBC Miami reports that Broward County receives all sorts of strange 9-1-1 calls. Many of them are not legitimate emergencies:

According to the Broward Sheriff’s Office call center, nearly half the 911 calls they receive are for things not quite a life or death situation – unless you consider a fast food order an emergency.

“My toilet’s overflowing, what do I do? That’s my personal favorite,” BSO Sheriff Al Lamberti said.

While it’s a stretch, a busted toilet at least could, conceivably, be considered an emergency. But there is no rationale for the number calls that sound something like this:

“I ordered chicken nuggets and they don’t have chicken nuggets,” one woman called 911 to report.

On one hand, this sounds quite silly. On the other hand, perhaps people really think these situations are emergencies. If this is the case, this may be a bigger issue: the idea of an emergency has become much more smaller in scope and individualized.

Quick Review: City of Quartz

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For a Midwesterner like myself, Los Angeles can seem like a strange and mysterious place: it certainly is a different kind of city compared to the older cities of the Midwest and Northeast. The book City of Quartz by sociologist Mike Davis adds to the mystery while also explaining why Los Angeles is the way it is. Some quick thoughts on this book:

1. The scope of this book is tremendous and includes discussions about history, politics, conservative revolts from suburbanites,  policing, and culture. The scope is staggering and fascinating.

2. Davis would seem to fall into the Los Angeles School of urban sociology. While action and development can usually be explained by politics and money, his emphasis is also on the disjointed nature of the metropolis. With the downtown core continually struggling to assert its authority, the tale of LA includes many other actors, including the Westside and suburbanites, trying to promote their own goals.

3. Davis continually plays with the idea of LA as suburban paradise and exposes the dystopian reality behind this facade. While it may have sunshine, orange groves, and movie stars, the city has a daunting list of troubles including race relations, pollution, sprawl, water shortages, and crime. Most of the stories in here are heavily tinged with this dystopian vision.

Overall, this is the sort of urban sociology text that I find incredibly engaging. It is lacking in a few areas such as potential solutions for LA, comparisons to other cities (is LA completely anomalous or was it simply the first of its kind?), and not being up-to-date (published in 1990). But for someone looking to understand Los Angeles and all of its strangely fascinating complexity, this is an excellent read.

The racial bias in predatory lending

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A new study in the American Sociological Review explores how race impacted predatory lending and the larger U.S. housing crisis:

Poorer minority areas became a focus of these practices in the 1990s with the growth of mortgage-backed securities, which enabled lenders to pool low- and high-risk loans to sell on the secondary market, Professor Douglas Massey of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and PhD candidate Jacob Rugh, said in their study.

The financial institutions likely to be found in minority areas tended to be predatory — pawn shops, payday lenders and check cashing services that “charge high fees and usurious rates of interest,” they said in the study.

“By definition, segregation creates minority dominant neighborhoods, which, given the legacy of redlining and institutional discrimination, continue to be underserved by mainstream financial institutions,” the study says.

The larger tale is that minority neighborhoods still do not have the same access to banks and lending institutions that non-minority neighborhoods enjoy. While the practices are now less covert (no redlining, restrictive deeds and covenants, riots when minorities moved into white neighborhoods), there are still clear race lines in American lending. These lending patterns have a strong impact on where people live, contributing to residential segregation (as seen in these maps).

The most dangerous American neighborhoods

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Walletpop.com has its second annual list of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America:

For the second year in a row, using exclusive data developed by Dr. Andrew Schiller’s team at NeighborhoodScout.com, and based on FBI data from all 17,000 local law enforcement agencies, WalletPop reveals the top 25 most dangerous neighborhoods with the highest predicted rates of violent crime in America.

This year, Chicago took the not-so coveted top spot from Cincinnati for the most dangerous neighborhood, while Atlanta has the highest number of neighborhoods making the list (four).

You may ask, why neighborhoods and not cities? Schiller explains that even the cities with the highest crime rates can have relatively safe neighborhoods, and thus it is less useful to generalize about an entire city.

The reason for looking at neighborhoods rather than cities is a good one – most American cities are quite large so city-level data is not very useful. To see the data for the Chicago neighborhood that tops the list, check out this page.

NBCChicago.com seems to have made an interpretation error with the data:

According to the info, anyone walking down Lake Street between Damen and Western has a 1 in 4 chance of being a victim of a crime.  Those who choose to live there face the same odds with the chances of being robbed.
As far as I can tell, the neighborhood crime rates apply to people living there for a full year, not people just walking in the neighborhood.
The website that this crime data was developed for, neighborhoodscoutreports.com, seems like it has some interesting proprietary data. When you enter a zip code, you can purchase a full report – though they leak out a few interesting tidbits. According to the website, zip code 60187 (Wheaton, IL) is “More sophisticated than 97%of U.S. neighborhoods. More walkable than 65%.”

Measuring the economy by looking at midnight Walmart shoppers

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There are all sorts of figures and statistics that are used to measure how the economy is doing. This NPR story introduces a new metric: looking at midnight sales at Walmart on the first day of the month.

Wal-Mart noticed that sales were spiking on the first of every month. In a recent conference call with investment analysts, Wal-Mart executive Bill Simon said these midnight shoppers provide a snapshot of the American economy today.

“And if you really think about it,” Simon said, “the only reason somebody gets out and buys baby formula is they need it and they’ve been waiting for it. Otherwise, we’re open 24 hours, come at 5 a.m., come at 7 a.m., come at 10 a.m. But if you’re there at midnight you’re there for a reason.”

And so Wal-Mart has changed its stocking pattern. It brings out larger packs of items in the beginning of the month, and smaller sizes toward the end. It makes sure shelves have plenty of diapers and formula.

This is a creative data source – but we would need more information before making broad conclusions about the American economy. Do other stores experience similar spikes? How big of a spike is this? What Walmart locations have seen the biggest jumps?

It strikes me that Walmart probably possesses a treasure trove of data that would be very interesting to look at.

Making the case for reputational rankings

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A statistician argues that the National Research Council’s study of doctoral programs released earlier this week should have included reputational rankings:

Mr. Stigler says that it was a mistake for the NRC to so thoroughly abandon the reputational measures it used in its previous doctoral studies, in 1982 and 1995. Reputational surveys are widely criticized, he says, but they do provide a check on certain kinds of qualitative measures. When the new NRC counts faculty publication rates, it does not offer any information about whether scholars in the field believe those publications are any good. (That’s especially true in humanities fields, where the NRC report does not include citation counts.)

“Everybody involved in this was trying hard, and with good intentions and high integrity,” Mr. Stigler says. “But once they decided to rule out reputation, they cut off what I consider to be the most useful measure from all past surveys.”

In an e-mail message to The Chronicle this week, Mr. Ostriker declined to reply to Mr. Stigler’s specific statistical criticisms. But he pointed out that the National Academies explicitly instructed his committee not to use reputational measures.

I was curious about this when I looked at the list of sociology doctoral programs. Perhaps several of the schools that were lower than I expected, such as the University of California – Berkeley, were lower because of this.

Stigler defends reputational measures but I’ve seen others argue that they prohibit “true” rankings within fields because certain schools retain a reputation even without the necessary output (research, good grad students, etc.). This particular discussion is part of a larger one where it will need to be decided whether reputational rankings should be used or not.

Quick review: Watching The Social Network at Harvard

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This weekend, the movie The Social Network, a disputed origin story about the founding of Facebook, hit theaters to nearly universal acclaim.  I had the opportunity to see the movie on the second day of release and can add my wreath to the many laurels heaped upon this Aaron Sorkin–David Fincher collaboration.  However, since so many others have dissected this film so thoroughly, I will refrain from a typical movie review as I feel I have little to add.  I will instead comment briefly on just how surreal it was to watch this movie at Harvard.

The AMC Loews Harvard Square 5 is located one block off the Yard at Harvard University, and the mood at the 6:30pm showing on Saturday, October 2nd was electrifying.  The audience appeared to be a mix mostly of college students and their professors, and they clearly had come to have a good time.  When the Mark Zukerberg character, played by Jesse Eisenberg, made a crack early in the movie about Boston University students not needing to study, there was a collective gasp.  When the exterior of The Thirsty Scholar made a cameo appearance, there were actual cheers.

This movie was about us–not as representatives of some abstractly-defined generation nor as students coming of age during web 2.0–but as residents of Mt. Auburn Street, two blocks away.  In the men’s bathroom after the movie, I overheard a conversation between two students debating the wisdom of trying to get into one of Lawrence Summer‘s classes now that he is returning to Harvard (after working as director of the White House National Economics Council).

Many of the best movies take us from our own specifics into the universality of the human condition.  While I am sure that The Social Network will do this for many people, it had quite the opposite effect on me.  For me, it took that most abstractly universal of all web phenonmenon–Facebook–and gave it a specific human face.  One that might well have been in the theater with me last night.

Cities using art as a development tool

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USA Today describes the attempts of some cities, including Grand Rapids, Michigan, to use art as a development and economic tool.

This is not a new phenomenon. Richard Florida, in particular, has promoted this with his ideas about the “creative class.” But, perhaps we will see a rise in this sort of activity as cities look for non-traditional economic foundations.

h/t The Infrastructurist

More discussion about teaching “The Wire” at Harvard

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The class revolving around the television show The Wire in the Harvard Sociology Department continues to draw attention. Here is a quick summary of the some of the public discussion:

In a Boston Globe editorial, Eugene and Jacqueline Rivers, co-founder of the Boston Ten-Point Coalition and Harvard University doctoral student, respectively, wrote in support of the class:

One of the most difficult challenges confronting intellectuals is how to discuss the relationship between race and poverty in Obama’s “post-racial” America…”The Wire” can usefully serve as a non-partisan political resource for engaging the issues of race and poverty.’

The two add that the show is smart and creative, and that it can lead to discussion about programmatic responses to systematic inequality in the inner city.

On the opposite end of the spectrum stands Ishmael Reed, a professor at University of California-Berkeley who also contributed an op-ed on the subject to the Globe.

Reed believes that professors like Wilson are more concerned with using “hot courses built around sensational popular culture like hip-hop and crime shows as a way of filling seats in their classroom,” than with seriously examining race and class relations. Reed contends that the show is riddled with stereotypes, and should not be utilized in a university setting.

I would be curious to hear about the outcomes of the course, both for students and faculty.

What these comments about this particular class are hinting at is that there is disagreement about how to best teach courses about race, poverty, and social class. There are numerous resources professors can draw upon, including a wealth of ethnographic work from the last twenty years.