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Interest in modeling contemporary crime trends, a task that has historically been considered valuable to the public, researchers, and policymakers, is resurging. Advancements in criminology have made it clear that understanding crime trends necessarily involves understanding trends in how likely individuals are to report crimes to the police, as well as how likely the police are to accurately record those crimes. In this paper, we use dynamic linear models to simultaneously model the time series for several crime types in order to gain insight into trends in crime and crime reporting. We analyze crime data from Chicago spanning 2007 through 2016 and show how correlations in the way crime trends evolve may contain information about drivers of crime and crime reporting. We provide evidence of substantial differences in the relationships between the trends of crimes of different types depending on whether crimes are violent or nonviolent and whether or not crimes are tracked in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of recent studies have used surveys of neighborhood informants and direct observation of city streets to assess aspects of community life such as collective efficacy, the density of kin networks, and social disorder. Raudenbush and Sampson (1999a) have coined the term “ecometrics” to denote the study of the reliability and validity of such assessments. Random errors of measurement will attenuate the associations between these assessments and key outcomes. To address this problem, some studies have used empirical Bayes methods to reduce such biases, while assuming that neighborhood random effects are statistically independent. In this paper we show that the precision and validity of ecometric measures can be considerably improved by exploiting the spatial dependence of neighborhood social processes within the framework of empirical Bayes shrinkage. We compare three estimators of a neighborhood social process: the ordinary least squares estimator (OLS), an empirical Bayes estimator based on the independence assumption (EBE), and an empirical Bayes estimator that exploits spatial dependence (EBS). Under our model assumptions, EBS performs better than EBE and OLS in terms of expected mean squared error loss. The benefits of EBS relative to EBE and OLS depend on the magnitude of spatial dependence, the degree of neighborhood heterogeneity, as well as neighborhood's sample size. A cross-validation study using the original 1995 data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and a replication of that survey in 2002 show that the empirical benefits of EBS approximate those expected under our model assumptions; EBS is more internally consistent and temporally stable and demonstrates higher concurrent and predictive validity. A fully Bayes approach has the same properties as does the empirical Bayes approach, but it is preferable when the number of neighborhoods is small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since this society is oriented toward a specific theory, I thought I ought to say something about theories in general and our little theory in particular. Let me get that off of my chest. I am not overly fond of terms like "theory" and "theorist," both of which seem to suggest the importance of the person who claims the identity more than anything else. They are pompous terms. To the extent that we are thoughtful about what we are doing and how we are going about it, all sociologists are theorists and methodologists. But if that is all we are, then we are literally people of no substance. We have no substantial knowledge of or concern for the empirical world. The little theory we share is extraordinarily empirical. It is, as one of its most prominent practitioners called it, a "grounded theory" (Glaser and Strauss 1967). I confess that several years after receiving my degree I had no real sense of what symbolic interaction was and how it might differ from other theoretical orientations. Arnold Rose enlightened me on this when he asked me to submit a paper for a new collection he was editing (Rose 1962). I was pleased and flattered. Rose was a mentor of mine, and I had never before been asked to contribute to an edited volume. But I was unsure of what would be appropriate for a book about symbolic interaction. I screwed up my courage and asked Arnold: "Exactly what is symbolic interaction?" He shrugged off my ignorance, turned on his heels, and muttered over his shoulder, "It is what they do at Chicago." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article presents a five-year ethnographic study of informal social control in the Chicago neighborhood "Beltway," where controls at the private and what has traditionally been known as the parochial level are weaker and less important than heretofore assumed. In addition, the parochial and the public arenas are inseparable from each other, not independent as others have argued. Instead, informal social control in Beltway is characterized by what the author calls the "new parochialism," where diminished private and traditionally parochial forms of social control are replaced by a combination of parochial and public controls. The new parochialism is occasioned by wider societal and local changes, and the concept is shown to have theoretical and empirical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes up the discussion recently stimulated through the volume, A Second Chicago School? That book's connecting postwar Chicago sociology with the "Chicago approach" of mainly the 1910s to 1930s is extended, going back as far as the turn of the twentieth century and also forward to the 1990s, with a view endorsing Simmelian interactionism as opposed to Spencerian utilitarianism. Albion Small, first Chairman of the Chicago Department, introduced a Simmelian sociology to the U.S., and the question arises to what extent this legacy is being realized until today. Using Anselm Strauss as a case in point, the article has two main parts. Part One recapitulates various attempts at understanding the phases and realms of Chicago sociology. The focus is not only on the various "Chicago Schools" that may be separated, but also the differences in the work of three scholars who often are grouped together under the label of Chicago, namely Herbert Blumer, Robert Park, and Everett Hughes. Part Two recollects Strauss's intellectual biography, as life of a scholar determined to make a contribution to modern sociology, in the name of "Chicago interactionism." Strauss's work, however, came to endorse Spencerian-type utilitarianism more than Simmelian-type interactionism from the middle 1960s onwards--thereby joining in with anti-structural functionalism tendencies in American sociology.(n1) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the contemporary appeal of the Chicago sociology perspective in France, and analyzes the bases of its attraction. Old Chicago sociology/anthropology was a heady and fruitful conjoining of ethnography, urban ecology and geography, interactionist social psychology, and pragmatist epistemology. Using the vocabulary of science, it spoke of the city of Chicago as its laboratory, but what this meant was that its students were exhorted to exit the library in order to roam, observe, and undertake what then were termed case studies and today, urban ethnography. The laboratory was particularly exciting because of the growth in the population in Chicago, Illinois. Immigrants had been flooding the U.S. and its urban centers throughout the late 19th and early 20th century, and Chicago was a nodal point. Within Europe of the period there had also been migrations on a lesser yet also significant scale, especially from the east to the west. In France, Europe, an throughout the world, an intense process of urbanization has been occurring. The challenge has been how to understand and describe the processes and their consequences, other than being publicly appalled. Jammed side by side in these immense cities are clusters and communities of families and peoples differing in languages, religions, ethnic-cultural origins, and social race.