You Are Where You Live
Robert Sampson’s Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neiborhood Effect will not only change the way we think about neighborhood effects, it also sets a new standard for social scientific inquiry.
Robert J. Sampson, 2012.Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, University of Chicago Press.
Source: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo5514383.html
Is place irrelevant in the face of global economic forces and information technologies in the 21st century? Is geography dead? Is community dead?
Numerous public intellectuals and social theorists have insisted that community is dead. Some would have us believe that we act solely as individuals choosing our own fates regardless of our surroundings, while other theories place us at the mercy of global forces beyond our control. These two perspectives dominate contemporary views of society, but by rejecting the importance of place they are both deeply flawed.
Great American City set out to examine community-level influences on individual development. Based on one of the most ambitious studies in the history of social science, Sampson argues that communities still matter because life is decisively shaped by where you live.
He discovers that neighborhoods influence a remarkably wide variety of social phenomena, including crime, poverty, child health, protest, civic engagement, home foreclosures, teen births, altruism, leadership networks, community efficacy and immigration.
Following in the influential tradition of the Chicago School of urban studies but updated for the twenty-first century. This book is at once an intellectual history of an idea, the story of a major research project, the tale of an iconic city, a systematic theory of neighborhood effects, an empirical account of community-level variations in a range of social processes, an analysis of competing schools of social inquiry, and a sustained empirical analysis that was designed to uncover new facts while adjudicating and integrating existing hypotheses.
William Julius Wilson wrote in the preface, “Robert Sampson’s Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect will not only change the way we think about neighborhood effects, it also sets a new standard for social scientific inquiry”.
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