Tenth Blog Response

• Using Summon search engine and limiting yourself to peer-reviewed journal articles, build a 3-4 source bibliography, with commentary on the sources for each of two possible research presentation projects. Blog about your two possible projects and your sources you found for each.

One of the possible presentation topics that I have been thinking about would be one relating to violence and it's effect on youth, and different ways to measure that. My two interdisciplinary majors are Criminal Justice and Biology, and there are so many connections in both that lead us to believe that a child's earliest years through adolescence tend to be the most influencing on the path that their life will take. For this subject, I found two articles with the full text available online that discuss different factors and explanations for youth that are exposed to violent behaviors at a young age, and how they choose to cope with violence. Data is gathered and trends are measured throughout neighbors that attempt to explain the factors that go into a youth's violent behavior, where their influences may be coming from, and how it affects us as a society both socially and criminally.

     <Estrada-Martínez, Lorena M., Caldwell, Cleopatra, H., Schulz, Amy J., Diez-Roux, and Ana V., Pedraza, Silvia. "Families, Neighborhood Socio-Demographic Factors, and Violent Behaviors among Latino, White, and Black Adolescents." Youth Society June 2013: 45.2. SAGE Journals with Full Text. Web. 7 Oct. 2013.>

     <Zimmerman, Gregory, M., and Steven, F. Messner. "Individual, Family Background, And Contextual Explanations Of Racial And Ethnic Disparities In Youths' Exposure To Violence." American Journal Of Public Health 103.3 (2013): 435-442. CINAHL with Full Text. Web. 7 Oct. 2013.>

• Another possible research topic that could connect both Biology and Criminal Justice would be links that are found to affect humans negatively, and connections that may be had to crime. There is some interesting speculation made between the effect that crime could have on us biologically, or the tendency for certain areas to have high rates of things such as asthma as well as a high rate of crime and how the two may coincide.

     <Golembeski, C, and R Fullilove. "Public Health Consequences Of Imprisonment. Criminal (In)Justice In The City And Its Associated Health Consequences." American Journal Of Public Health 95.10 (2005): 1701-1706. CINAHL with Full Text. Web. 28 Oct. 2013.>

     <Emily, A. Wang, et al. "Neighborhood Incarceration Rate And Asthma Prevalence In New York City: A Multilevel Approach." American Journal Of Public Health 103.5 (2013): e38-44. CINAHL with Full Text. Web. 28 Oct. 2013.>

Ninth Blog Response

I'd like you to post an entry putting forward your own responses (or positions) about the role of leadership elites in community contexts. Demonstrate familiarity with Sampson's chapter, but also express your own opinions clearly. When you're done with that part of the post, append a paragraph discussing how your own research for your presentation is going.

First off, I think the link that Sampson finds showing the connections between the various areas (Community organizations, politics, religion, law, education, business, and other) are very interesting. The influence that politics has on most of the rest of the institutions is high which can be expected, but also the ties between politics/community organizations and religion is noteworthy. It's interesting that in a city like Chicago there is such a high correlation between religion and politics, and I feel that if the same study were conducted here there would be an even higher correlation between the predominant religion and politics and community events.

Secondly, it's interesting to see the ties between all of the leaders at the community level and their ties to one another. Page 343 of the book gives us a good map of the community-level ties and even correlates that to family income, and delves deeper into all of the different ways that a community may be connected.

My research for the presentation is going well so far. It is quite easy to tie Biology and Criminal Justice to one another in some way, because in the past and even in present situations, they have been tied to one another as far as Biology causing crime, and crime being a derivative of our biological influences, etc. The exact topic that I will undertake when preparing for my presentation will be met when that is closer, but there are many useful resources that tie Biology to Criminal Justice and vice versa.

Eighth Blog Response

     You've read Sampson on mobility and division in Chicago. So, drawing on and integrating your two emphasis areas, how would you answer these two questions: Why do people chose to move to different neighborhoods? How likely is it that their individual choices will transform the communities they leave or enter?

     Why do people chose to move to different neighborhoods? Drawing on a biological standpoint, there could be many reasons why people choose one place over another. One of the reasons may be that people simply feel more comfortable in neighborhoods where they are surrounded by others like them. The neighborhood surroundings may be something they are comfortable with, or it may fit their life or lifestyle. As people tend to advance through generations, may their education and status will increase, and they will move on to a neighborhood with a higher socioeconomic status than their previous one.
     From a criminal justice standpoint, it could be viewed that people choose their neighborhoods either to participate in or distance themselves from crime. While one person may choose a certain neighborhood because they believe the likelihood of them being caught while participating in a certain act may decrease, another person may avoid that neighborhood due to a negative criminal stigma. The acceptance or avoidance of crime could be used to greatly influence where one chooses to reside, going even as far as to say the country that some people choose to live in may be influenced by the criminal opportunities offered them in a certain area.

     How likely is it that their individual choices will transform the communities they leave or enter? In biology, symbiotic relationships are those where individual organisms affect one another in a positive, negative, or neutral way. While this may not effect the ecology of a large area, it depends on the impact of that organism as to whether it will have a large or a small impact on their environment. As to people, I believe that humans can tend to interact in the same way and influence one another whether negatively, positively, neutrally, or anywhere in-between.
     From a criminal justice standpoint, and drawing from the research done in Sampson's book, it seems that individuals and their choices seem to have little influence on the communities they live in. Many of the things he says point to the fact that communities are an entity in themselves, and that they govern themselves regardless of who's there, who moves in/out, or many other factors.

Blog Response #7

• Write up your pair of sources for each of your two possible presentation topics, explaining the value of each source and how it might help you integrate your emphases for your term research presentation.

• One of the possible presentation topics that I have been thinking about would be one relating to violence and it's effect on youth, and different ways to measure that. My two interdisciplinary majors are Criminal Justice and Biology, and there are so many connections in both that lead us to believe that a child's earliest years through adolescence tend to be the most influencing on the path that their life will take. For this subject, I found two articles with the full text available online that discuss different factors and explanations for youth that are exposed to violent behaviors at a young age, and how they choose to cope with violence. Data is gathered and trends are measured throughout neighbors that attempt to explain the factors that go into a youth's violent behavior, where their influences may be coming from, and how it affects us as a society both socially and criminally.

     <Estrada-Martínez, Lorena M., Caldwell, Cleopatra, H., Schulz, Amy J., Diez-Roux, and Ana V., Pedraza, Silvia. "Families, Neighborhood Socio-Demographic Factors, and Violent Behaviors among Latino, White, and Black Adolescents." Youth Society June 2013: 45.2. SAGE Journals with Full Text. Web. 7 Oct. 2013.>
     <Zimmerman, Gregory, M., and Steven, F. Messner. "Individual, Family Background, And Contextual Explanations Of Racial And Ethnic Disparities In Youths' Exposure To Violence." American Journal Of Public Health 103.3 (2013): 435-442. CINAHL with Full Text. Web. 7 Oct. 2013.>

• Another possible presentation topic is the effect that our biology may have on our tendency to commit or resist crime. This article attempts to integrate biology and criminal justice/criminology along with other sociological and psychological factors to delve into possible genetic factors that may influence us to commit crime. Among the things they study are autonomic arousal, neurobiology and neuroendocrine functioning in an attempt to find evidence supporting the theory that our biology does in fact relate to our behavior.

     <Wilson, Laura C., and Scarpa, Angela. "Criminal Behavior: The Need for an Integrative Approach That Incorporates Biological Influences." Journal of Contemporary Criminal-Justice Aug. 2012: 28.3. SAGE Journals with Full Text. Web. 7 Oct. 2013.>