For the last few months, some downsizing has been taking place in a modest West Loop office space. At one time, more than 60 employees coursed through here, day or night and throughout the weekend. Now only a few remain: Their phase of a long-term project is over; later this year someone else will take over this conventional, cubicle-filled room.
There’s nothing conventional about their project, however. Many scholars have credited it with being one of the more comprehensive social-research studies on urban life in American history–with a focus on Chicago.
“The Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods” is a $54 million research effort co-sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, National Institute of Justice and National Institute of Mental Health. It involves educators from institutional powerhouses like Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.; the Teachers College at Columbia University in New York; the University of Chicago; and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
“This study sets a standard–its measures of neighborhoods are better than they’ve ever been before,” said Tom Cook, a sociology professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, who has been a project adviser off and on for almost a decade.
For the last 8 years, researchers have used a variety of tactics to gather data for this project–including interviews with more than 20,000 Chicago residents and their children, videotaping street scenes and interviewing community residents.
The goal was to combine two unprecedented studies into a single, comprehensive social-research project–one looking at the social networks in all Chicago neighborhoods, from wealthy to poor; the other examining the lives of a randomly selected group of children in many of those same neighborhoods.
Along the way, the project hasn’t always received wholehearted acceptance. Some community leaders–especially in African-American neighborhoods–expressed distrust, partly because of concerns over how the project’s data would be used. A few in the scientific and educational communities also were skeptical.
“There were some rough spots,” said Laurie Garduque, the senior program officer and project liaison for the MacArthur Foundation. “When the study first came to Chicago, there were questions about the goals and ambitions of the study. And there were criticisms about the design and what the payoff would be.”
Data-gathering end in sight
But a milestone has been reached–the end of the data-gathering stage for both studies. Field researchers will finish gathering data for the neighborhood part of the study this summer.
Meanwhile, the data-gathering stage for the longitudinal children’s study ended Dec. 21, which means that field supervisor Isaias Mercado was looking for a new job by the end of January. He was one of the 60 people hired to gather data for this part of the project–he spent seven years on the study.
Now he hopes the educators who use this data will do it justice.
“I just hope this can change public policy and make life better for people at large when it’s implemented,” Mercado said. “I don’t just want this to be a theoretical study. I want to see it implemented.”
That is the sentiment shared by the scholars who were early catalysts and remain involved with the project: Felton Earls, a professor of human behavior and development at Harvard’s School of Public Health; Robert Sampson, a sociology professor at the U. of C.; Steven Raudenbush, an education professor at Michigan; and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, a Marx professor of education at Columbia .
These educators see the volume of information gathered being used to help make public policy decisions.
“It’s potentially useful to residents, community organizations, those in the business of providing funds for communities in need,” Sampson said. “In the past, much of the decision-making on grants was based on poverty. What we’re saying is that this is one more piece of information beyond what has been traditionally focused on.”
“We’re hopefully creating a scientific evidence base that would be useful for informing both policy and practice at multiple levels,” Garduque said.
Examining all communities
The size and scope of the project is overwhelmingly ambitious. Its neighborhood study examines the infrastructure in Chicago’s communities, from socioeconomic to political and cultural.
The first phase of the neighborhood study was conducted in 1995 and 1996; the second phase started in 2000 and will end this summer.
Although 77 communities are “officially” designated neighborhoods by the city, this study breaks down the neighborhoods into 343 different communities. The educators did this by examining census data and asking residents what they considered their “neighborhood” to be.
“We looked at geographic boundaries and also took into account parks and major streets as boundaries for communities,” Sampson explained “And we asked the people what their neighborhood consisted of. Through that, we pieced together what we called `neighborhood clusters.'”
More than 8,700 residents in these 343 communities were interviewed during 1995 and 1996 for this part of the project, which tries to identify the causes and reasons behind crime and disorder in urban neighborhoods; and the ways such problems have been mitigated in these communities.
Starting in 2000, researchers have been going back to 80 of these 343 communities, asking about 4,000 randomly selected residents the same questions that were in the first phase.
Sociologists “have always known about a connection between crime and various aspects [like] poverty,” Sampson said. “And while we always felt that was important, both policy and research had dwelled too much on attributes–things that are non-changing–and didn’t try to get at the mechanisms. Which is what we’re about–trying to understand the processes.”
Looking at children
The other major part of the project is the series of coordinated longitudinal studies, where the lives of more than 6,500 children and adolescents from newborn to 18 years old are tracked over an eight-year period.
This study–which involves 80 of the 343 Chicago neighborhood clusters–is being used to understand the reasons that children and young adults become involved with crime; and, conversely, what positive influences lead children toward socially acceptable behavior. It also is being used to look at the psychological effects that crime and disorder have on children as they grow up.
“A high proportion of children [in urban areas] are exposed to catastrophic events–people being shot and killed, and finding dead bodies,” Earls said. “What we did was put a lot of emphasis on the neighborhoods and children’s accumulating exposure to violence both directly and indirectly.”
The children’s study tracked groups in six age categories–birth to 3, 3 to 6, 6 to 9, 9 to 12, 12 to 15 and 15 to 18.
Children and their parents or guardians were interviewed three times during the eight-year period. Each interview lasted two hours. Questions included how the children were doing in school, child-care issues, the children and their exposure to violence, how the children were disciplined, health services the children have received, and anxiety disorders and economic hardships in the household.
“In a way it’s similar to projects I’ve worked on in the past, and in a way it’s different,” said Alicia Schoua-Glusberg, the director of survey operations for the children’s study.
“What is different is that we’re not just looking at the children, we’re looking at the interaction of the community with the child.”
Combined, the studies had around 120 field interviewers. Participants in the study were paid from $10 to $25 for each interview.
Major findings
The project already has produced major findings, which for the last few years have been published in periodicals such as Science, Criminology and American Journal of Sociology.
What is considered the most important finding involves the social dynamics of city neighborhoods and how the dynamics affect crime and disorder. Data from interviews shows that crime and disorder drops in city neighborhoods when there is consistent positive interaction and cooperation between community residents. An obvious example used by project leaders is circulating a petition to get rid of a nuisance–such as a “drug house”–in a community.
Project leaders use the term “collective efficacy” when describing this cooperative relationship among neighborhood residents.
“It’s a sense of shared expectations among neighbors,” Sampson said. “It’s the social networks people have, the values that they share and whether or not they trust each other.”
Residential stability is key to collective efficacy, according to study data. Communities, even poor ones, with higher rates of homeownership also had higher rates of collective efficacy.
Middle-class neighborhoods like Morgan Park, Avalon Park, Hegewisch and Forest Glen had high levels of collective efficacy, according to the study, while Englewood was a neighborhood with low levels.
Contradicting a theory
The study also shows that crime and disorder usually stem from certain neighborhood characteristics, most notably concentrated poverty.
But the study suggests that disorder–best characterized by things such as graffiti, vandalism and minor public incivilities like drinking on the street–doesn’t directly lead to major crimes like homicide. The only crime directly linked with disorder is robbery, according to the study.
That is a finding that contradicts the so-called “broken windows” theory that most notably has been adopted by New York City officials–and one that is credited for that city’s 70 percent drop in homicides since 1993. That theory said the best way to control crime is through aggressive police tactics, against even the most minor offenses.
“The idea of broken windows and crime is one of the leading theories of crime rates and one that’s had a tremendous impact on policy,” Sampson said. “But we found that levels of homicide and burglary are affected most by the amount of poverty and the strength of collective efficacy in the neighborhood.”
In addition, the study determined that a neighborhood’s spatial location has a direct influence on the amount of crime. Even a middle-class neighborhood can be highly susceptible to crime if it is next to a high-risk community.
Looking at a middle-class white neighborhood and a middle-class black neighborhood, “you would think that their risk profiles are similar,” Sampson said. “But if you look at the maps and do the analysis, you find that the middle-class black neighborhoods in Chicago are often spatially proximate to other high-crime neighborhoods because of segregation. Through diffusion and crossing boundaries, that leads to a higher crime rate.”
Meanwhile, preliminary findings from the longitudinal children’s study show that neighborhood resources can affect the ability of parents to monitor and control their children’s behavior.
Data shows that parents reported more child-monitoring resources when they had a higher socioeconomic status and had lived for a longer period of time in their neighborhoods. In more disadvantaged neighborhoods, where transients are more common, residents reported considerably lower expectations for shared child-control.
Project coordinators hope to have more information on violence in Chicago neighborhoods and its effect on children soon.
“What we’ve done is put a lot of emphasis on the neighborhoods and children’s accumulating exposure to violence both directly and indirectly,” Earls said.
“We’re looking to answer questions like whether or not children in violent communities have anything like post-traumatic stress syndrome.”
Despite these findings, the project’s supervisors know that much more can be developed from the data.
“Much of what we’ve done is plant apple seeds, and at this point we can see blossoms, but not apples,” Earls said. “The early findings are surprising and useful, but the best is yet to come.”
Sampson said, “I fully expect that 30 years from now, other investigators will be analyzing and picking up where we left off.”
By this fall, project coordinators plan to combine data from both studies so they can begin preparing a more detailed, comprehensive analysis. The idea is to make the information available to a wider audience.
That won’t be easy, say some urbanologists who aren’t involved with the project, noting that although the exhaustive data-gathering process was unprecedented, it isn’t accessible to the general public.
“Part of the problem is how can this data be interpreted so there’s an active agenda that can be taken from it,” said Michael Bennett, a sociology professor at DePaul University in Chicago and the executive director of that school’s Egan Urban Center.
“The project right now is too academic,” Bennett said. “It needs to be shaped a little more so it can be used by community groups for public policy.”
Bennett also understands some of the early concerns of African-American community leaders.
Those concerns partly stem from a general wariness about research projects involving minorities–a concern engendered by efforts like the Tuskegee, Ala., syphilis study, where a group of black men who suffered from the disease were left untreated between 1932 and 1972, ostensibly for scientific research reasons.
The community leaders also had concerns about minority neighborhoods being stereotyped through the data.
“Casual readers of the data might be able to use it to fortify their notions that the inner city is violent,” Bennett said. “That’s not the fault of the study, but it’s a possibility.”
Former project site director John Holton is credited with placating concerned members of the black community. But even he has questions about how all the information eventually will be used.
“People typically want to see social science produce some sort of tangible asset that leads toward the creation of a program or public policy,” said Holton, who was with the project from 1993 through 1999.
“And that’s exactly what gets research and science in trouble with the real world. You can say we made some advances in methodology. But does social science serve people broadly or does it serve it narrowly?”
Data from the project raises many questions but doesn’t provide many answers, he said. “You don’t have an infrastructure in place to say [whether or not] collective efficacy can be produced,” he said. “For instance, can we increase collective-efficacy levels in areas where it is needed?”
Project representatives acknowledge there is no definitive goal on how the information will be used. Still, there are examples of the data being utilized–at NU’s Institute for Policy Research, for instance, information from the project is being used in studies on school reform.
“We’re now using the data to see how school and neighborhood forces in combination affect the educational performance of kids,” said Tom Cook, a faculty fellow at the institute.
Sampson mentions the possibility of creating a Chicago community fact book, based on the data. “The hope is that that fact book could be produced by 2003,” he said.
Earls plans to enlist a variety of experts outside the project to try to translate the data and make it more accessible to the public. “Public relations, policymakers, community activists–those are people we’re looking forward to working with, who can help us with the translation,” Earls said.
Choosing Chicago
It will be the latest challenge for Earls, who has been involved with the project since its inception in 1988. He was instrumental in the decision to choose Chicago for the study. New York City, Baltimore, New Orleans and Los Angeles also were considered. Baltimore and New Orleans were ruled out because of their relative lack of diversity–the cities primarily consist of black and white residents.
Chicago stood out because of its diversity: The city has sizable white, black and Hispanic populations. Plus, the Hispanic population continued to grow dramatically throughout the 1990s, which made the city even more attractive to the coordinators.
“We were surprised when we got to Chicago and realized how brisk Hispanic immigrations were here,” Earls said. “Not only did Chicago have many new immigrants from Mexico, but [a sizable population of] second- and third-generation Mexicans as well.
“And the diversity of Chicago’s Hispanic community also worked in the city’s favor. There’s no other American city with sizable Mexican and Puerto Rican neighborhoods.”
Finally, the city’s history of social research projects gave Chicago the edge over New York and Los Angeles.
“Chicago has a long history with that going back to the early part of the century,” Sampson said, “and that provides an advantage. We have a picture of what’s happened in Chicago communities over a long period of time. Other communities don’t have that.”
