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The article comments on a paper exploring the notion that nighttime social life in urban areas resembles social life on former land frontiers, published in one of the previous issues of the journal. The paper was authored by sociologist Murray Melvin. The author of the article objects the use of historical materials and evidences to test the hypothesis that nighttime urban social organization parallels frontier social organization. It is opined that Melvin exhibits a cavalier expediency with regard to historical data which both weakens a potentially useful argument as well as nullifies any test of relationships. Further, the importance of accurate archival data to Melbin's argument cannot be overlooked. This archival evidence as presented, is no more than introductory sociology term paper tactics. The use of historical materials cannot be taken lightly. The utility of this approach is to observe concepts and variables in a context of closure and control. While there is inevitable error in these sources, the strength of the context which provides closure, control, and no recurrent input gives yet another framework with which to understand the dynamics of society.

In a recent issue of ASR, Finke and Stark (1988) reported results that contradict long-standing views on the relationship between religious pluralism, urbanism, and religious participation. They argue that religious pluralism and urbanism are positively related to religious participation. The present paper disputes the generality of Finke and Stark's findings with both methodological criticisms and new data. With regard to pluralism, although the traditional views are supported, a new theoretical interpretation is introduced and empirically supported: religious pluralism appears to have differential effects on religious participation, depending on the religious makeup of the religious community along a liberal-to-conservative continuum. Finally, the best evidence suggests that there probably is not an important rural-urban difference in the rate of church adherents today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a test of Burgess' concentric zone and Hoyt's sector hypotheses of urban residential structure using the structural dimensions suggested by Shevky and Bell. Residential areas in four cities were studied. Each city was selected because it possessed a roughly circular total shape and because its population was between 200,000 and 500,000. The results indicate clearly that Burgess' concentric zone hypothesis is essentially supported with respect to urbanization but not with respect to social rank (or prestige value as this dimension is termed in this paper), while Hoyt's sector hypothesis is supported with respect to social rank (prestige value) but not with respect to urbanization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores changing patterns of class mobility in the city of Toulouse, France during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Class categories are used to map out mobility patterns across locations in the social relations of production rather than across locations in status hierarchies. Data on patterns of intergenerational mobility derived from the marriage records of 1830 and 1872 are used to document the rigidity of class boundaries at different points in time, the sources of recruitment for newly emerging working-class positions, and the impact of changes in production relations upon the character and meaning of mobility patterns. Changes in mobility patterns are situated within the historical context of the changing social relations of production that marked the rise of early industrial capitalism. The final section of the paper provides some hypotheses regarding the impact of changing mobility patterns upon the process of class formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author presents his comments on the views given by Seymour Spilerman and Richard E. Miller about his article. The objections that Spilerman and Miller (S&M) raise in their comment are partly the result of misreadings of the Ross M. Stolzenbergs and Ronald D'Amico paper and partly the result of disagreement over methodological and theoretical issues. The race occupation relationship does not vary substantially across SMSAs; the race-SMSA relationship does not vary substantially across occupations; and the occupations SMSA relationship for whites does not differ materially from the occupation SMSA relationship for blacks. The occupational distributions of blacks and whites in different cities can be reproduced with tolerable accuracy from the three pair wise relationships among city, race and occupation. Implication means that stratifying an analysis of the race occupation relationship according to city of residence will, at best, add no information to one's findings, except possibly in the case of anomalous SMSAs. The literature which one criticize is first and foremost a set of stratified analyses in which a summary measure of the race occupation relationship is computed in each SMSA, and then this measure is related to other characteristics of the SMSA.

This paper analyzes the relationship between intelligence and occupation and, secondly, relates occupation to various aspects of migration. The relationship between occupation and test intelligence has been the subject of considerable investigation. There tends to be a hierarchy of occupational structure which is closely related to test intelligence, whether the classification is based on the subject's parental occupation or on his own occupation. The material for the investigation consists of the Ohio State University Intelligence Test scores for about 5,000 boys and girls who were high school seniors in 116 Missouri communities in 1939-41. There seems to be a distinct tendency for the brighter boys and girls in rural areas and small towns of Missouri, to find their occupational levels in the higher prestige occupations, especially the professional groups, while those who perform more poorly on tests are more likely to become manual worker and farmers with somewhat lower rankings on the prestige scale.

In the last two decades most of the Western world has experienced a striking marriage boom. The annual number of marriages and marriage rates have been at a higher level than before in the United States, most of Northwestern Europe, and among the European populations in the countries of the British Commonwealth. Many features of the sharp fluctuations in marriage rates can be explained by reference to events of the period. Thus all the belligerent countries had a conspicuous peak in marriages in the early postwar years. The decline in the age at marriage has been very rapid, and the marriage pattern revealed in recent data for several Western countries is unprecedented in the period for which statistical records exist. The extent to which different socio-economic groups have participated in this change in marriage patterns may give important clues to its significance. The present paper deals with the contrasts between urban and rural areas and with analysis by level of education.

Although the objective of the large study of which one facet is here reported was to test certain hypotheses with respect to causal factors in integration, this paper is not concerned with causes. But something must be said on this subject in order to make clear why the data concern only four cities. The studies through 1946 indicated that there was great variation among large American cities in integration as measured positively by welfare effort and negatively by crime, and that more than three-fifths of the variance was attributable to two causal factors—degree of heterogeneity of the population in terms of nationality and race, and in- and out-migration of the population. It was also found that the residual, unexplained variance in integration was much greater for some cities than for others. It was presumed that other causal factors were working strongly in the cities whose integration scores could be predicted least accurately from their population composition and mobility scores.

This paper offers two sets of analogous hypotheses concerning the effects of city size and region upon people's tolerance. Data are examined from national surveys focusing upon diverse indicators of tolerance, conducted between 1947 and 1982. The results suggest that the effects of city size-net of compositional variables-have declined. By contrast, the effects that can be uniquely attributed to region do not appear to have declined, and they almost always exceed the (unique) effects of city size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes a sample of real estate ads from the classified section of the Seattle Times newspaper for the period 1920-1978 to evaluate the changing nature of locality identification within the central city. Inconsistent with traditional versions of mass society theory, the importance of locality identification as revealed by the ads has not declined substantially over time; if anything, the evidence indicates a slight increase in identification. Variations in identification among Seattle neighborhoods suggest that social structural features of areas such as their social status and distance from the central business district are strong, enduring, determinants of locality naming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper focuses on an attempt to validate a measure of mental health. The subject of the investigation is a scale included in a study of mental health in an urban area of southwest Michigan. The twenty-two questions used in the scale had been designed to assess the mental health of respondents in the New York Midtown study. Responses to these questions had correlated with the mental health ratings given by the Midtown study psychiatrists. One of the aims of the present study was to appraise the concurrent validity of a mental health scale derived from the questions used in the Midtown study. The scale was based upon a simple addition of the number of questions that were answered positively by the respondent. A summary score of "0" represented best mental health while higher scores were indicative of progressively poorer mental health. This scale will be referred to as the 22 Item Mental Health (MH) Scale. Two main techniques were used to evaluate validity. The first was the known groups procedure, in which the questions were administered to samples drawn from populations whose mental health was known or might be estimated. The second was the independent criteria method, in which other measures of mental health were compared with the results obtained from the 22 Item MH Scale.

Sociologists in the Chicago tradition looked at the city as a "mosaic of social worlds" culturally differentiated and socially insulated from one another. These they termed local communities. This paper reports on a search, in a central area of a modern metropolis, for comparable units. The results suggest that residents of a metropolis see their city as composed of named and bounded areas, and that these areas have status-ascriptive functions in urban social relations. The data indicate that residents of the named areas use local facilities only in a limited way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major objective of this paper is to describe with a high degree of specificity the more significant economic, demographic and social determinants, and dimensions of crime areas in a large urban community. The basic data include two series of crime statistics, "offenses known to the police" and "arrests," totaling over 65,000 cases, along with detailed economic, demographic, and social statistics from the 1950 decennial census. A 38 x 38 correlation matrix, based on 20 crime indices and 18 economic, demo graphic, and social variables was derived. This matrix was analyzed by the principal axes technique. Eight factors were extracted and retained for orthogonal rotation. To determine how the basic dimensions derived for the community as a whole are related to specific areas, standard factor scores for each of the eight factors were computed for the 93 census tracts in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of urban sociology rests upon observations made in countries representing a small and biased sample of the world as a whole. Any attempt, however, to remove this narrow restraint that is, any attempt to extend comparative urban analysis to include all parts of the earth runs into the complex problem of comparability. In the present paper there is a resolution to offer for this problem as it affects all aspects of urban sociology. The proportion of people living in urban places or in cities of a given size is considered a fundamental trait of any society. The data required for computing such proportions are, for many countries at least, readily obtainable and hence widely used. In view of the importance and wide use of data on the degree of urbanization in countries and regions, it is essential that such data be at least approximately comparable from one area to another. There must be assurance that persons included as city residents in one country are not excluded in other countries, and vice versa.

The border-states of Missouri and Kentucky currently present a picture of incomplete racial desegregation of the public schools. Roughly 64 percent of the counties with Negroes in each of these states had started or had plans by May 1957 for some racial integration in education. Questions immediately arise as to the possible differences between desegregating counties and those maintaining complete segregation. The present paper relates this scattered design of segregated and integrated counties to three demographic variables. Two principal factors have been held by educators and social scientists as crucial in school integration—urbanism and Negro ratio. A third demographic variable, economic prosperity, is closely related to urbanism and Negro ratio and often cited as independently important in race relations. The mixed pattern of acceptance of public school integration is in important part a function of a number of demographic factors. Urbanism and economic prosperity appear to be crucial variables. All 24 of the predominantly urban counties in the two states are desegregating, and even the partly urban counties are more often desegregating than totally rural counties.

This paper, is primarily concerned with the changes in the degree of residential segregation between 1940 and 1950. For this purpose the analysis was restricted to the 185 cities appearing in both series. The average segregation score for these cities increased by +.033 from .734 to .767. However, since such an average gives equal weight to cities of all sizes, it was deemed preferable to compute a combined index based upon the sums of all of the original figures. Significantly, the degree of change was exactly the same, +.033, for this combined index as it was for the average of indexes, increasing from .830 to .863. The precise agreement, both in direction and amount of change, between these two sets of figures leads to the certain conclusion that residential segregation in these American cities did in fact increase during the decade, 1940-1950. Apparently the Supreme Court decision declaring restrictive covenants unconstitutional did not produce any significant or immediate change in the tendency to segregate nonwhites. In fact, segregation increased in the face of this decision and other influences toward desegregation.

This article is an attempt to formulate a series of generalizations concerning suicidal behavior based on all completed and attempted suicides recorded in Seattle, Washington during the five-year period, 1948 to 1952. It was shown that attempted suicides constitute an important part of the suicide complex and that the pattern for attempted suicides is in many respects different from the pattern for completed suicides. These basic points and characteristics may be expressed in the form of the following generalizations: the use of age-sex standardized rates by census tract has indicated that spatial distributions of completed and attempted suicides in Seattle are highly correlated and correspond to a pattern which is typified by high rates in the central business district and contiguous areas and relatively low rates in outlying residential sections. Although males predominate among completed suicides and females are more numerous in attempting suicide, total suicidal behavior is equally characteristic of both sexes. For males, rates of total suicidal behavior tend to increase with age, while female rates of total suicidal behavior are highest in the early years of adulthood. Important differences were found in suicidal behavior by race. Chinese and Japanese have low rates of both completed and attempted suicides. Negroes and Indians have a low incidence of completed suicide and suicide.

Social scientists are often confronted with the problem of dividing large areas into smaller sub-units for purposes of research. The process through which any desired sub-area system is derived varies with the theoretical position and substantive interests of the investigator involved. In recent decades, urban sociologists and ecologists have been particularly concerned with the division of cities (large areal units) into census tracts (small areal units). The distinction and utility of the census tract lies in the fact that it is the smallest urban area unit for which the Bureau of the Census regularly reports complete information. The method discussed in this paper has been developed in the course of formulating a census tract plan for the city of Lansing, Michigan. The general problem to be solved is that of dividing a total area into a set of subareas which meet a criterion of demographic homogeneity. Ideally, two conditions should obtain in the resulting scheme: (a) the resulting sub-areas must be continuous and contiguous, and exhaust the total space within the corporate limits of the city, and (b) the populations contained within the sub-areas should achieve a maximum degree of homogeneity within each sub-area and a maximum degree of heterogeneity among the subareas.

One modern school of family sociologists considers the present urban American family an alarming instance of disintegration in the familial process. Another school considers the modern urban family to be making a reasonably satisfactory adjustment to population density. It is the purpose of this paper to point out certain trends that may be leading toward the emergence of a variant type of urban family which may be able to satisfy the requisites of sociologist C.C. Zimmerman and yet function adequately in the urban community. Various trends in American society do not prove conclusively the existence and operation of a fringe family. These trends fall under the categories of demographic, ecological, labor force, and social stratification. If one follows the clues suggested by current urban population and economic trends in the light of what is already known about the modern suburban family, a number of inferences on the structure of the fringe family becomes possible.

The modern period of city planning, which dates roughly from the World's Fair of 1893, has been dominated from its inception by architects, landscape architects, and engineers. Their domination has spread from the private consulting firms to the established planning commissions and departments on federal, state, and local levels. For years the problems laced and dealt with in the planning field were problems with which these specialists were equipped to deal, and the buildings, fountains, civic centers, lagoons, monuments, and even the highways were treated in isolation from the thinking and research of the social scientists. The latter were pursuing the problems of urbanism in their own way, and for the most part with neither knowledge or concern of efforts of those technicians in the drivers' seats of the planning firms, commissions, or departments. The plea made by this paper is that the social scientist in general, and the urban sociologist in particular, make certain amendments and additions before the planners.

Recent developments in the study of vital statistics have made the factors involved in rates of death a little more apparent. Certain hypotheses have been given additional support by the new evidence available, while other generally accepted as are coming under the shadow of doubt. The purpose of this paper is to present some findings on this "matter of life and death" for Virginia. A death rate is a ratio of a number of deaths, occurring in a specified period, to a given population subject to the risk of such death. In practice, there are difficulties in obtaining accurate data and in defining their use. The distortion of the population figures by the hope of securing old age assistance is best shown in the urban nonwhite groups of age 65 to 69. Both males and females have lower death rates at 65 to 69 than at 60 to 64. The rural nonwhites were also sufficiently influenced so that their age specific death rate charts are inflected at these ages. The qualified conclusion is that when females appear to have higher death rates than males it is due to childbearing under conditions which produce high maternal mortality. Wider use of the sulfonamides may eliminate enough of the risk of maternity to reduce all female rates below those of males in the near future.

In the present paper the supporting data is presented to show that the number of persons that move between any two communities in the United States whose respective populations are P1 and P2 and which are separated by the shortest transportation distance, D, will be proportionate to the ratio, P1 * P2/D, subject to the effect of modifying factors. The first economy of living at the immediate source of raw materials saves the work of transporting the raw materials to the production-centers; the second economy of living in one big city where all production is done saves the work of transporting the goods to the consumers. Since the population cannot live both in a lot of communities scattered over the terrain and at the same time in a single big city, it is obvious that the above two economies are in conflict. The first economy of living at the immediate source of raw materials will act in the direction of making a large n-number of different communities of small P-sizes, if the terrain is reasonably homogeneous in its distribution of raw materials per unit of area in terms of cost in man-hours in procuring them.

Two things are being attempted in this paper: first, by a brief discussion of the socialization process taking place in a specific Polish-industrial community to demonstrate the inadequacy of a clinical etiology of neurosis in terms of either love-thwarting or the arbitrary exercise of authority; second, to explain in sociological terms the context in which "lack of genuine love" and "authority" operate to produce neurotic symptoms. This is also true of parent-child relationships. The local Polish parents emigrated before marriage from farm villages and small towns in Poland. While the old familistic tradition has been slowly deteriorating in rural Poland for several decades, enough of that tradition was brought with them so that their expectations of their American-born children's conduct reflected an alien peasant system of values. An outstanding feature of peasant family life, in contradistinction to that of modem middle-class family organization, is the stress placed upon rules and work-functions rather than personal sentiment; and parental authority is excessive by the standards of any comparable segment of the American population. These rules of conduct and this parental authority are out of place in the American industrial slum.

The article presents information on a study which examines the effects of socioeconomic factors on the residential segregation of blacks and Spanish Americans in the urban areas of the U.S. Also, this study compares patterns of black and Hispanic segregation with respect to the effects of socioeconomic variables. Following the tenets of human ecology, and in light of previous findings regarding ethnic segregation, the study hypothesizes an inverse relationship between socioeconomic class and degree of Hispanic segregation from whites. This study found that the high degree of segregation between blacks and whites cannot be accounted for by socioeconomic factors alone, but patterns of Spanish-white segregation are very much related to social class. It was found that socioeconomic status increases, within-class segregation between Spanish Americans and whites falls off steeply. It was concluded that it is absolute, and not relative, socioeconomic status that is important in determining levels of ethnic segregation.

The article discusses organizational ecology by focusing on urbanization and natural resources. The article attempts to formulate and test a theory designed to explain differences among countries with respect to two related phenomena, urbanization and metropolitanization. In the case of urbanization, the theory seeks to account for differences in the proportion of the population residing in cities, while in the case of metropolitanization the concern is with differences in the proportion of the population residing in large cities. The social organization concept has received an insufficient attention from sociologists. This has been a result of dominance of economics and geography in this area. The conception of human ecology as the study of sustenance organization appears to be more consistent with the nature of ecology in other fields and to be potentially more fruitful than spatial ecology for the development of useful theory and meaningful empirical propositions. This article explores one of the implitions of an organizational ecology. The article presents some tests as simple demonstrations of the ability of organizational ecology to generate meaningful empirical propositions. The author feels that these tests will stimulate interest in a reconsideration of human ecology.

The article presents a reply to the comments made by sociologist Burton B. Silver, on a paper written by the author, discussing the notion that nighttime social life in urban areas resembles social life on former land frontiers. In reply to the charges of using inadequate evidences, the author argues that he never said that he will use archival evidences to support his view. About the adequacy of tests, and especially of the historical evidence offered: it is opined that the more general a hypothesis, the greater the variety of potential disconfirmation or support for it. There is more information to scan, more diverse tests to apply, more chances for battering the hypothesis with inconsistencies among the findings. On the issue of using a wide span of fifty years for studying the U.S. western frontier, the author clarifies that he sought to characterize a land frontier, and to summarize its features fairly and generally enough so that he could reconceptualize the idea to fit a space-time container of living rather than only a spatial one.

Largely overlooked in the theoretical and empirical literature on the crime decline is a long tradition of research in criminology and urban sociology that considers how violence is regulated through informal sources of social control arising from residents and organizations internal to communities. In this article, we incorporate the “systemic” model of community life into debates on the U.S. crime drop, and we focus on the role that local nonprofit organizations played in the national decline of violence from the 1990s to the 2010s. Using longitudinal data and a strategy to account for the endogeneity of nonprofit formation, we estimate the causal effect on violent crime of nonprofits focused on reducing violence and building stronger communities. Drawing on a panel of 264 cities spanning more than 20 years, we estimate that every 10 additional organizations focusing on crime and community life in a city with 100,000 residents leads to a 9 percent reduction in the murder rate, a 6 percent reduction in the violent crime rate, and a 4 percent reduction in the property crime rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can protest bring about social change? Although scholarship on the consequences of social movements has grown dramatically, our understanding of protest influence is limited; several recent studies have failed to detect any positive effect. We investigate sit-in protest by black college students in the U.S. South in 1960, which targeted segregated lunch counters. An original dataset of 334 cities enables us to assess the effect of protest while considering the factors that generate protest itself—including local movement infrastructure, supportive political environments, and favorable economic conditions. We find that sit-in protest greatly increased the probability of desegregation, as did protest in nearby cities. Over time, desegregation in one city raised the probability of desegregation nearby. In addition, desegregation tended to occur where opposition was weak, political conditions were favorable, and the movement’s constituency had economic leverage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses data on prisoners incarcerated for misdemeanors in late-nineteenth-century U.S. cities to assess a three-part argument that asserts that threats to white dominance prompted efforts of social control directed against African Americans and foreign-born whites: (1) For African Americans, competition with whites for jobs instigated efforts by whites to enforce the racial barrier. (2) For the foreign-born, upward mobility became associated with white identity, which allowed those who “became white” to be seen as less threatening. We thus expect the threat from foreign-born whites to be highest where their concentration in poverty was greatest. (3) We suggest that violence against a given boundary raises the salience of group threat, so a positive relationship should exist between prior violence against a group and its level of incarceration for misdemeanors. Using panel analyses of cities from 1890 through 1910, we find supporting evidence for the first two arguments and partial support for the third. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Few words in the current American lexicon are as ubiquitous and ostensibly uplifting as diversity. The actual meanings and functions of the term, however, are difficult to pinpoint. In this article we use in-depth interviews conducted in four major metropolitan areas to explore popular conceptions of diversity. Although most Americans respond positively at first, our interviews reveal that their actual understandings are undeveloped and often contradictory. We highlight tensions between idealized conceptions and complicated realities of difference in social life, as well as the challenge of balancing group-based commitments against traditional individualist values. Respondents, we find, define diversity in abstract, universal terms even though most of their concrete references and experiences involve interactions with racial others. Even the most articulate and politically engaged respondents find it difficult to talk about inequality in the context of a conversation focused on diversity. Informed by critical theory, we situate these findings in the context of unseen privileges and normative presumptions of whiteness in mainstream U.S. culture. We use these findings and interpretations to elaborate on theories of the intersection of racism and colorblindness in the new millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a reply by the authors to a commentary on their study, History Repeats Itself, But How? City Character, Urban Tradition, and the Accomplishment of Place, published in the December 2000 issue of the American Sociology Review. The researchers disagree with the commentary's statement regarding sense of history and, more concretely, how its author assembles and interprets data. For doing history, the author wants to find the independent variable that explains why one place comes to differ from another. The word capital is used in the commentary as proxy for the variable at work. In the Ventura case, investment in petroleum represents the capital that explains almost everything, and the author recognizes the data to show why, Santa Barbara's character can be explained by the capital introduced by wealthy immigrants and the interests of a tourism industry. For this main case, the author argues that a difference in the geographic distribution of petroleum exploitation within each country meant that things had to end up as they did; little or nothing is gained from all of our meandering through the institutional, political, and aesthetic aspects of place. The study focuses on the processes by which past choices come to be taken as givens to the point that outcomes seem as though they could have been no different.

This study shows how places, and by implication other societal units as well, achieve and reproduce distinctiveness. It does this by specifying how actors in two California urban areas, over approximately 100 years, responded differently to the same exogenous forces. Each place is examined to determine how unlike elements conjoin to produce a particular "character" at any given moment and how this character travels through time to constitute a local "tradition." Borrowing from advances in analyses of structure and agency, this study displays character and tradition as accomplished interaction and helps make an elusive process empirically evident and accessible for study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has found only modest effects of community size on social psychological characteristics of residents. Focusing on urban experience, I find that urbanism' s impact on personality may be stronger than previously thought. For respondents whose urban experience is adequately reflected by available community size measures, community size has strong positive effects on tolerance. Migration also promotes tolerance regardless of size of destination community.

Theories of the global expansion of Western mass education tend to assume the replacement of indigenous educational systems. Data from two surveys of youth in an Islamic, West African city, conducted five and nineteen years after national independence, indicate a convergence in the social forces that predispose attendance in the new and old systems. Using a standard nine-variable model of educational attainment, of five variables that had significant but opposite effects on Islamic and Western schooling attendance in the first cohort, only one significant opposing effect still operated in the second. Average years of attendance increased for both Western and Islamic schooling. Hypotheses are offered to explain the apparent structural accommodation of the two systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing research on comparative studies of homicide in the United States reveals significant methodological advances but inconsistent findings. A major goal is to identify sources of inconsistency and accumulate more valid and reliable results. This analysis empirically examines a major problem with most previous comparative studies-the failure to disaggregate the overall homicide rate into more refined and conceptually meaningful categories of homicide. A theoretically integrated model is presented that guides the calculation of disaggregated rates and the derivation of hypothesized relationships. Using data from the Comparative Homicide File (CHF), the analysis shows that indicators of resource deprivation and social disintegration tend to have significant effects across subtypes of homicide, although the magnitude of the effects varies, while indicators of violent cultural orientation are confined to homicides resulting from interpersonal conflicts. The implications of the results for comparative research on homicide are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines whether the propositions of Wirth (1938) and Stouffer (1955) concerning the effects on tolerance of urbanism, region, and particular geographic migration patterns can be generalized to racial tolerance. Using prejudice toward blacks as the outcome measure, an analysis of national survey data for the years between 1972 and 1985 indicates that (a) consistent with Wirth's and Stouffer's arguments, urbanites and non-Southerners are more racially tolerant than their nonurban and Southern counterparts; (b) contrary to some previous research, the net effects of urbanism on tolerance have increased over time while region effects have decreased; (c) the effects on tolerance of urban to nonurban migration confirm Wirth's notion of the permanence of urbanism's influence but not Stouffer's culture-shock hypothesis; and (d) the implications of regional migration are more complex than previous research has indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-1970 population redistribution shifts in several developed countries have led to unprecedented population losses in their largest metropolitan areas. Migration processes that underlie these shifts in the United States are evaluated in light of two theoretical perspectives which foresee decidedly different redistribution tendencies. The regional restructuring perspective attributes recent losses to selective disinvestment in old manufacturing areas but anticipates gains to command and control center locations for expanded multilocational production organizations. The deconcentration perspective anticipates a pervasive diffusion of population associated with increasing locational flexibility of employers and residents. Redistribution shifts are evaluated by comparing the projected redistribution tendencies of the 1965-70 and 1975-80 migration streams for regions, metropolitan areas, and thirty-five individual metropolises. These comparisons support the deconcentration perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data from a national sample (N = 2694) are used to test hypotheses drawn from Wirth (1938) and Stouffer (1955) concerning the effect of urbanism on tolerance, here measured in terms of respondent's willingness to extend civil liberties to members of various target groups. Supportive of Wirth and Stouffer, findings suggest that urbanism per se increases tolerance for a variety of groups whose members hold unpopular if not deviant ideas and interests. Also supportive of Wirth and Stouffer, rural-urban migration is found to increase tolerance, but contrary to Stouffer, urban-rural migration is found to be unrelated to tolerance. It, is concluded that Wirth's view of the influence of urbanism on tolerance as permanent is supported, but that Stouffer's culture-shock hypothesis is not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Upon not finding a direct relationship between civil disorder and welfare growth in American cities in the late 1960s, some analysts have rejected the Piven and Cloward (1971) thesis that the expansion of welfare in the late 1960s operated largely as a form of social control so as to recreate political stability. We hypothesize that the welfare explosion in the late 1960s was in part the result of a two-step process in which civil disorder impelled the national government to enact liberalizations of welfare policy which in turn were most actively implemented by those states most wracked by rioting. Analysis of the relative state growth rates in the number of families receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children suggests the plausibility of our hypothesis and the Piven and Cloward thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is considerable conjecture but little evidence regarding the social contexts in which municipalities adopt growth controls. Likewise, the influence of planning interventions on growth rates and community satisfaction is not known. The best predictor of anti growth policies among Northern California city planning agencies is the percentage white collar population and not, as recent urban literature predicts, relative community status or social homogeneity. The hypothesis that associations between city planning practices and community variables are mediated through local activism is given support. However, growth rates are not influenced by growth controls or the social variables associated with anti growth policies. Further, a survey of Northern California residents suggests that those living in growth control communities report less community satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classical theory that urbanism produces interpersonal estrangement is supported by evidence that urbanism is associated with less public helpfulness and more social conflict. This theory is challenged, however, by evidence that urbanism is not associated with residents' having any fewer social ties or suffering higher psychological stress. An alternative theory contends that urbanism produces fear and distrust of "foreign" groups in the public sphere, but does not affect private social worlds. This new survey study supports the latter explanation by reconfirming earlier findings and showing that urbanism is not correlated with distrust of neighbors but is correlated with distrust of "other people" in the wider community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the effects of household crowding in urban areas. Among the pathological consequences catalogued by the authors are poor mental health, withdrawal, a lack of effective planning, deteriorated physical well-being, poor familial relations and child care. Not incidentally, the number of people in the household has conceptual and analytical implications for the lack of privacy and demands, the two other independent variables. As the number of people increases arithmetically, the complexity of interaction increases as an exponential function. Hence, the degree to which number of people is related to the experiential variables is an important consideration. Unfortunately, the analysis is presented in a way that does not permit us to evaluate the relations between the experiential variables and the components of people-per-room. Curiously, after demonstrating that people-per-room is highly correlated with number of people in the household, the authors do not control for number of people in their analysis. Perhaps the findings would have been very different had they done so.

In this study the causes of two aspects of white movement to the suburbs are analyzed: the probability that a white central city resident moved to the suburbs between 1965 and 1970, and the probability that a white in-migrant to metropolitan areas settled in the suburbs. The units of analyses are the 112 metropolitan areas where the central city had a 1960 population of 100,000 or more, and where the central city and the metropolitan area were not coterminous. Primary concern is with determining whether whites were "fleeing" central city problems (such as crime, taxes, strikes, race riots, and large black populations) or were drawn to the suburbs because it is there that new housing and jobs were located. A model of the suburbanization process is explicated and evaluated, using path analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A distinct geographical distribution of criminality exists in the Soviet Union as a result of the measures of social control exercised over the mobility and residence of the population, and that differentiates Soviet crime from that of both developing and developed countries. In the USSR increasing urbanization is not correlated with higher rates of criminality. As a result of the internal passport system and the difficulties of moving to large cities, the rates of criminality in the Soviet Union have shifted from the most populous cities of the USSR to the newly established cities of the far eastern and far northern parts of the USSR and to the rapidly expanding smaller urban centers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature relating community structural characteristics to policy outputs generally has failed to account for communities not considering an issue as a third type of outcome beyond rejection and adoption. It is argued that nonconsidering communities are likely to be very different from both nonadopters which have considered a policy and have subsequently decided to reject it and from those adopting a particular policy. These types should be separated in research on community structure and community outputs. The current research distinguishes between these three outcome types for fluoridation programs and relates these distinctions to the three important community structural characteristics of structural differentiation, community integration and the centralization of authority within municipal governments. The results of the analysis support the hypotheses, showing that both affinities and disaffinities exist between the communities classified by the three-part outcome typology. Rejecters and adopters are shown to be similar in terms of levels of structural differentiation, and can be distinguished from the less differentiated, nonconsidering communities. Conversely, both nonconsiderers and adopters tend to be more highly integrated and exhibit a greater centralization of authority than rejecters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of a 1964 national survey reveals that residents of the South displayed a much higher level of anti-black prejudice than residents of the non-South, but the regions differed only slightly on measures of anti-Semitism and anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant prejudice and on certain psychological measures-authoritarianism. anomia and psychic distress. Though. the mean level of anti-black prejudice was higher in the South, the variation of individuals around the mean in each region can be explained by roughly the same variables operating for the most part in the same way. The regional differences in anti-black prejudice cannot be accounted for by compositional differences between the regions in psychological characteristics, degree of urbanization, socioeconomic status or ethnic composition. Those who spent most of their childhood in one region but later moved to the other had attitudes toward blacks that were intermediate between those of the nonmigrants in each region; this pattern was not present for the other types of prejudice. The evidence presented tends to support a subcultural interpretation of the higher level of anti-black prejudice in the South in 1964. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community context is examined as having a possible causal influence on an individual's occupational status attainment and income. Additive city effects, between-city differences hi mean achievement levels, and nonadditive city effects, between-city differences in how important determinants influence these achievements, are examined. The data used represent probability samples from fifteen of the largest US. cities. Contrary to evidence from past research) neither additive nor nonadditive city effects are found for occupational attainment For income, nonadditive effects are not observed; the rather weak additive effects found are further reduced in magnitude when cost of living differences are controlled for. These findings for nonadditivity are interpreted to mean that across large U.S. communities the processes whereby socioeconomic statuses are achieved are homogeneous. Finding no additive effects indicates the relative unimportance of city contextual differences, but also suggests for occupational attainment, the importance of various equilibrating processes operating to match city population compositions with city opportunity structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data from the 1970 census show that black migrants to six of the nation's largest cities were less likely to be poor or on welfare in 1 970 than blacks born and raised in these cities. The cross-sectional pattern suggests that black migrants from the South may initially experience fairly high rates of poverty and welfare dependence, but after a few years tile Southern migrants are more successful in escaping from poverty and welfare dependence than blacks native to large cities in the North. Among whites in time six cities there is no consistent relationship between migration status and being poor and on welfare, except for slightly higher than average rates of poverty and receipt of welfare among the Southern born. These findings are placed in the context of previous research on differences between first-generation black Northerners and second-(and later) generation black Northerners. Sonic explanatory hypotheses are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of an industrial city on rural migrant family structure and the socialization of boys is analyzed in an observational study of family interaction in 167 lower class Brazilian families. Four groups of families were selected to represent points on a rural-urban continuum, ranging from peasants on plantations, to recent rural migrants to the city, to rural migrants who have established, a place for themselves in the city, and, finally, native urban dwellers. The study employs a theoretical which stress the ways in which experiences in the city change the personality and behavior of rural migrants, increasing their feelings of efficacy and altering perceptions and taints. Observation of family interaction revealed that with a longer period of residence in the city, migrant families become more egalitarian, family relations become more open and responsive, and parents place greater emphasis on achievement and independence for their sons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnic politics in urban America has allegedly been widespread and enduring over time. However, no studies have analyzed the ethnic impact on politics both historically and comparatively to determine whether this impact is steady or changing in magnitudes Using the size of immigrant populations and voting turnout data in 198 American cities for the period 1934-1960, this study attempts to measure trends in the relationship between the presence of nationality groups and municipal voting turnout. Controls for municipal governmental structures, city class structure, population change, and region are used to determine the structural boundaries under which immigrants' presence has an impact on turnout. The results show that the ethnic impact on voting turnout has declined in partisan cities but not in nonpartisan cities. This result suggests that ethnicity has been built into the political system in partisan cities; nonpartisan cities, in contrast, have no party system to build in ethnic interests. Hence, in partisan cities these interests persist from election to election as long as large ethnic populations are present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]