Transcript Slide 1

Ch. 28: The Epistemological
Challenge of the Early Attack
on “Rate Construction”
Troy Duster
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epistemological crisis
 epistemology: the branch of philosophy
concerned with the nature and scope of
knowledge, addressing questions such as:
 What is knowledge?
 How is knowledge acquired?
 How do we know what we know?
 epistemological crisis occurs when an event
forces us to question the foundations of
knowledge, what we accept as true
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2 major perspectives on deviance at
midcentury shared basic assumptions, or
epistemological framework
1) Columbia tradition, shaped by functionalism
and represented by Merton, studied deviance
at macro- and mid-level, relying on official
statistics
2) Chicago school focused on micro-level, and
studied deviance/deviants in natural settings to
see what deviance was “really like”
• Both shared accepted existing system of
classification of deviance
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In the 60s, researchers began
raising a different set of questions
 What are the social processes that explain why
some get classified and others don’t – even
though both are engaged in the same or similar
behavior?
 They studied the social construction of crime
rates, i.e., rate construction
 observed and recorded how official statistics are
compiled
 the site of rate construction, where actors make
decisions about what to sort and classify, became the
focal point of investigation
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Gang Leader for a Day:
A Rogue Sociologist Takes
to the Streets
Sudhir Venkatesh, Penguin
Books, 2008
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“Chicago School” of Sociology
 Emerged in 1920s – 1930s
 Specialized in urban sociology
 Used ethnographic techniques, immersed selves
in local settings
 Focused on micro-level interaction
 Emphasized individual’s relation to immediate
social environment, small units like family,
workplace, neighborhood, local community
groups
 Saw sociology leading to social reform
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African Americans in Chicago
 “Great Migrations” from 1910-1960
brought hundreds of thousands of blacks
from the American South to Chicago
 White hostility and population growth
combined to create a black ghetto on the
“South Side” of Chicago

The “Black Belt” of Chicago was the chain
of neighborhoods on the South Side where
3/4s of the city's African American
population lived by the mid-20th century
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William Julius Wilson

African American Professor of Sociology at U
of Chicago (1972 -1996), then Harvard

The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and
Changing American Institutions (1978)
 argues that significance of race is waning, and an AfricanAmerican's socioeconomic class is comparatively more
important in determining his/her life chances

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The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the
Underclass, and Public Policy (1987)
When Work Disappears: The World of the New
Urban Poor (1996)
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The “culture of poverty”
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Tried to explain why generations of poor
people reproduce same circumstances
1965 “Report on the Negro Family: The Case
for National Action” (aka “Moynihan report,”
after Sen. Moynihan, D, NY) investigated why
African Americans were not participating in the
“affluent society” and highlighted the following
factors:
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Weak family structure: "the fundamental problem is that of family
structure, that the negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling“
Rejection of values around self-reliance and work
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“Culture of poverty” critique
 Critics charged thesis “blames the victim” rather
than “the system” or institutionalized racism
 i.e., deeply embedded, historical racial discrimination
 Critics say problem is not black culture (i.e.,
values & norms) but socioeconomic structures
 prefer structuralist theories of poverty
 Today, researchers have re-conceptualized
culture and look at interaction between “culture”
& “structure” to explain persistent poverty (see
NYT, 10/17/10)
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The crack epidemic
 Crack epidemic decimated urban neighborhoods, in
1980s, peaking early in the 1990s
 First “crack babies” born in 1984
 Most children from the new generation stayed away from
crack and never tried it themselves. Alfred Blumstein, a
criminologist from Carnegie Mellon University, claims 4
factors account for the end of the epidemic:
1) getting guns out of the hands of kids
2) shrinking of the crack markets and their institutionalization
3) robustness of the economy – “There are jobs for kids now
who might otherwise be attracted to dealing"
4) criminal justice response, or as he puts it, "incapacitation
related to the growth of incarceration"
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Crime and mass incarceration
 1 in 31 adults in US is now in prison or jail or on probation or parole
 Correctional control rates are concentrated by gender, race &
geography:
 1 in 18 men (5.5%) vs 1 in 89 women (1.1%)
 1 in 11 black adults (9.2%); 1 in 27 Hispanic adults (3.7%);1 in 45 white
adults (2.2 %)
 Rates even higher in some neighborhoods: in one block-group of
Detroit’s East Side, for example, 1 in 7 adult men (14.3%) is under
correctional control
 Georgia, where it’s 1 in 13 adults, leads the top 5 states that also
include Idaho, Texas, Massachusetts, Ohio and the District of Columbia
(Pew Center on the States, “1 in 31,” 2008)
 Recent books by Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow, 2010) and
Douglas Blackmon (Slavery by Another Name, 2008) argue mass
incarceration of blacks is parallel to enslavement and peonage laws
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What about blocked access to the
“American Dream”?
 Or is the problem that Robert Taylor residents
shared American values – the American dream –
yet did not have the means to realize them?
 According to Merton’s “anomie theory” (aka
opportunity theory), when there's a mismatch
between culturally accepted goals and the
legitimate means to achieve them, anomie (or
strain) will result
 One response to anomie is "innovation," where
people strive toward culturally prescribed goals,
but by illegitimate (often criminal) means
 Gangs are a typical example
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Is Black America now “splintering”?
 In Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America
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(2010), Eugene Robinson, carves modern American
blacks into 4 categories:
Transcendants: wealthy blacks, composed chiefly of
athletes, singers and media darlings
Abandoned: a "large minority" of African Americans that
sociologists used to call the “underclass” in the 1980s
Emergents: people who are biracial, children of parents
from Africa or the African diaspora, or, like Obama, both
Black mainstream: a "middle-class majority with a full
ownership stake in American society"
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WHAT IS FIELD RESEARCH?
 Field researchers directly observe and
participate in natural social settings
 Examine social world “up close”
 Field researchers work w/ qualitative data
 There are several kinds:
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Ethnography
Participant observation
Informal “depth” interviews
Focus groups
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Ethnography
 ethno: people or folk
 graphy: to describe something
 ethnography: a detailed description of
insider meanings and cultural
knowledge of living cultures in natural
settings
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Studying people in the field
 Field researchers use a variety of
techniques, but share common principles:
 naturalism: the principle that we learn best
by observing ordinary events in natural
setting, not in a contrived, invented or
researcher-created setting
 flexibility: field research is less structured
than quantitative research and follows a
nonlinear path
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Robert
Taylor
Homes,
Chicago
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Robert Taylor Homes
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The “gallery,” Robert Taylor Homes
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Entering the field (cont’d)
 field site: any location or set of locations in
which field research takes place. It usually
has ongoing social interaction and a shared
culture.
 gatekeeper: someone with the formal or
informal authority to control access to a field
site.
 informant: a member in a field site with
whom a researcher develops a relationship
and who tells the researcher many details
about life in the field site.
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Entering the field
 Presentation of self
 consider how you dress
 want to fit in but be 'yourself'
 Amount of disclosure
 it’s a continuum: covert to open
 Selecting a social role
 formal and informal
 it may take time, role may change
 can't control it entirely, gender, race, age, etc
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Being in the field
 Learn the ropes
 normalize: how a field researcher helps field site members
redefine social research from unknown and potentially
threatening to something normal, comfortable and familiar
 Build rapport
 Negotiate continuously
 Decide on a degree of involvement
 “Degree of involvement” ranges from detachment to “going
native”
 going native: when a field researcher drops a professional
researcher role and loses all detachment to become fully
involved as a full field site member
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