What is a 21st-century neighborhood? How tied is it to the past? Why? What will a 22nd-century neighborhood look like? Is community dying, thriving, or just bumbling along, about the same now as always? Answer the above questions and be ready to talk in class about your final thoughts on Sampson's Chicago research and its relevance to communities generally.
In Sampson's conclusion about the changes he has seen in the city of Chicago, it is challenging to attempt to discern what he has truly found about the status of communities in the city and the change they have experienced. In his analysis of some parts of the city, it seems that some parts have changed for the better, some have stayed relatively the same, and some may have gotten worse. He seems to point to the answer being organizations that have the ability to bring communities together, as well as government funding being able to tie in individuals to make their lives and communities thrive.
Looking at Sampson's conclusion realistically, it is difficult to look into the future and see what the possibilities in future communities may be. While the world is becoming more technologically advanced on a daily basis, it would seem that the world would be brought closer together in an attempt to help humanity. While there are many humanitarian aid groups worldwide, the gap between the rich and poor countries of the world is ever-increasing. Here in the United States, the recession that began in the late 2000's continues to dwell, and is tied to community, economy, and crime in a very real way. It is difficult to say that if there were "X" numbers of government systems funded to help poor communities become more highly educated with less crime when the number of tax dollars to be spent on such projects is dwindling significantly. According to Forbes.com, there are 35 states in the U.S. where people could choose not to work and remain on welfare, and they would be better off than their counterparts who are working 40 hours a week at a minimum-wage job. Welfare, poverty, and crime seem to be so connected that the measurement of any one of these factors could directly influence the other two. It is a tremendous task to look into the future of this country.
Based off of the current course of the economy combined with the governmental procedure in solving the recession I am not able to answer the question to what will a 22nd-century neighborhood look like. My guess is that it will look very much like a 21st-century neighborhood, except for the fact that technology will continue to advance. There will always be crime, there will always be poverty, and there will always be factors of the economy that will not allow everyone to enjoy the same benefits. In answering Sampson's question, "Is the glass half-empty or half-full" my answer would be yes.
Monday, November 11, 2013
Monday, November 4, 2013
11th Blog Response
Skip ahead one chapter to Sampson's Chp 16: Aftermath: Chicago-2010. Find at least one other source (it can even be a reputable local news source) about Chicago in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and read that source as well. Now, what do you think of Sampson's arguments in the "aftermath" of the 2008 economic crisis? After answering that question, see if you can answer Sampson's own question: "Why does violence unhinge some communities and draw others closer together?" When you're done, give us your update on your presentation research, with citations.
From the reading, it seems that Chicago was basically the same once the financial crisis was averted. Many of the same inequalities that were in place pre-2008 remained after the crisis had come and gone. Sampson points to many instances where the low-class areas were cleaned up, and made way for more middle-income mixed families to move in. Other places mentioned like in Washington Park there seems to be a slowdown of the economy, and people still waiting for jobs to return to the area. There are high foreclosures throughout the city, and many in the lower-income neighborhoods. It seems that the hardest areas hit were the black neighborhoods, often suffering much worse than the white or even mixed neighborhoods. Drawing from these two different views, Sampson concludes that stability and change simultaneously exist in the area.
The supporting article that I found was titled: Bank Lending During the Financial Crisis of 2008 by Victoria Ivanshina and David Scharfstein. This article talked about the loans and lending for real estate and other investments following the financial crash of 2008. This article talks about the lack of credit following the collapse, and examines what finally caused the collapse and it's effect on major cities and the marketplace.
Update on my research: I have continued to research possible links between crime rates and poor health in impoverished areas and cities. Along with some research from Sampson, there are also other researchers who seem to link the possibility that when there is a tendency for a high crime rate there also tends to be tendencies towards low overall public health. I am trying to find if there is any current research that seems to explain why these tendencies arise, other than the research that I have already found and cited that states that there seems to simply be a correlation.
From the reading, it seems that Chicago was basically the same once the financial crisis was averted. Many of the same inequalities that were in place pre-2008 remained after the crisis had come and gone. Sampson points to many instances where the low-class areas were cleaned up, and made way for more middle-income mixed families to move in. Other places mentioned like in Washington Park there seems to be a slowdown of the economy, and people still waiting for jobs to return to the area. There are high foreclosures throughout the city, and many in the lower-income neighborhoods. It seems that the hardest areas hit were the black neighborhoods, often suffering much worse than the white or even mixed neighborhoods. Drawing from these two different views, Sampson concludes that stability and change simultaneously exist in the area.
The supporting article that I found was titled: Bank Lending During the Financial Crisis of 2008 by Victoria Ivanshina and David Scharfstein. This article talked about the loans and lending for real estate and other investments following the financial crash of 2008. This article talks about the lack of credit following the collapse, and examines what finally caused the collapse and it's effect on major cities and the marketplace.
Update on my research: I have continued to research possible links between crime rates and poor health in impoverished areas and cities. Along with some research from Sampson, there are also other researchers who seem to link the possibility that when there is a tendency for a high crime rate there also tends to be tendencies towards low overall public health. I am trying to find if there is any current research that seems to explain why these tendencies arise, other than the research that I have already found and cited that states that there seems to simply be a correlation.
Monday, October 28, 2013
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.
<Estrada-MartÃnez, 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.>
Monday, October 21, 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.
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.
Thursday, October 10, 2013
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.
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.
Monday, October 7, 2013
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.
<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.>
Monday, September 30, 2013
Sixth Blog Response
Introduce the sources you found after reading Sampson's 9th chapter. Explain how they relate to issues of particular importance to one or both of your emphases and then how you feel they relate to Sampson's methods for testing altruism, cynicism, and other-regarding behavior in Chicago. Be sure to include complete citation information for your sources.
In Sampson's 9th chapter, he goes into great detail focusing on three main points: social altruism, cynicism, and the "good community." He explains how these things either go towards helping or hurting the collective good of the community, and summarizes by saying that collective efficacy along with an altruistic character help the community wellbeing while moral or legal cynicism harm the community wellbeing. This chapter is focused around a few tests that he examines in order to get a closer look at how the neighbors of Chicago may work. The two tests that he uses are the "lost letter" test and the CPR test, both of which he says will give us greater insight into how these neighborhoods work.
One of the implications that Sampson points out towards the end of the chapter is that evolutionary biologists have linked altruistic behavior as a key factor in natural selection (230). In an article titled Can natural selection favour altruism between species, the authors Wyatt, West, and Gardner develop a spatial population genetic model of two interacting species and study whether altruism between different species either helps or hurts one or both species throughout the course of natural selection. While they come to the final conclusion that "natural selection does not favour traits that provide benefits exclusively to individuals of other species," they were attempting to find a link between species that would show benefits from helping one another.
Another interesting study is one conducted by Swatt, Varano, Uchida, and Solomon, and focuses on crime and collective efficacy in Miami. Titled Fear of crime, incivilities, and collective efficacy in four Miami neighborhoods, this research article attempts to tie in the importance of collective efficacy when focusing on crime. They did this through conducting surveys throughout Miami-Dade county, and then forming models based on these surveys. Through their studies they found that the "relationship between perceptions of collective efficacy and fear of crime exhibit significant heterogeneity between neighborhoods." They focused largely on the effects that incivilities such as physical/social disorder had on collective efficacy, and the effect that this then had on crime.
Works Cited:
Shellie E. Solomon, et al. "Fear Of Crime, Incivilities, And Collective Efficacy In Four Miami Neighborhoods." Journal Of Criminal Justice 41.1 (2013): 1-11. Academic Search Premier. Web. 1 Oct. 2013.
Wyatt, G. A. K., S. A. West, and A. Gardner. "Can Natural Selection Favour Altruism Between Species?." Journal Of Evolutionary Biology 26.9 (2013): 1854-1865. Academic Search Premier. Web. 1 Oct. 2013.
In Sampson's 9th chapter, he goes into great detail focusing on three main points: social altruism, cynicism, and the "good community." He explains how these things either go towards helping or hurting the collective good of the community, and summarizes by saying that collective efficacy along with an altruistic character help the community wellbeing while moral or legal cynicism harm the community wellbeing. This chapter is focused around a few tests that he examines in order to get a closer look at how the neighbors of Chicago may work. The two tests that he uses are the "lost letter" test and the CPR test, both of which he says will give us greater insight into how these neighborhoods work.
One of the implications that Sampson points out towards the end of the chapter is that evolutionary biologists have linked altruistic behavior as a key factor in natural selection (230). In an article titled Can natural selection favour altruism between species, the authors Wyatt, West, and Gardner develop a spatial population genetic model of two interacting species and study whether altruism between different species either helps or hurts one or both species throughout the course of natural selection. While they come to the final conclusion that "natural selection does not favour traits that provide benefits exclusively to individuals of other species," they were attempting to find a link between species that would show benefits from helping one another.
Another interesting study is one conducted by Swatt, Varano, Uchida, and Solomon, and focuses on crime and collective efficacy in Miami. Titled Fear of crime, incivilities, and collective efficacy in four Miami neighborhoods, this research article attempts to tie in the importance of collective efficacy when focusing on crime. They did this through conducting surveys throughout Miami-Dade county, and then forming models based on these surveys. Through their studies they found that the "relationship between perceptions of collective efficacy and fear of crime exhibit significant heterogeneity between neighborhoods." They focused largely on the effects that incivilities such as physical/social disorder had on collective efficacy, and the effect that this then had on crime.
Works Cited:
Shellie E. Solomon, et al. "Fear Of Crime, Incivilities, And Collective Efficacy In Four Miami Neighborhoods." Journal Of Criminal Justice 41.1 (2013): 1-11. Academic Search Premier. Web. 1 Oct. 2013.
Wyatt, G. A. K., S. A. West, and A. Gardner. "Can Natural Selection Favour Altruism Between Species?." Journal Of Evolutionary Biology 26.9 (2013): 1854-1865. Academic Search Premier. Web. 1 Oct. 2013.
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