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Sampson: So let’s move then to a discussion of the project, and let me just say at the
outset that this is a large-scale project, it’s a collaborative project, again, funded by
MacArthur, National Institute of Justice, and later on, National Institute of Mental
Health and many other foundations.
And I’ll end by telling you where we’re at with it, call it PHDCN for short, many
collaborators with this in the early days and continuing — Tony Earls, Steve Raudenbush,
Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, and others should be acknowledged — and it’s had many spinoffs, as you
will see, which is an advantage, I think, to the funding of a project by an agency,
because there are unintended consequences.
But we designed it in a very special way.
The first was, if context is important, one must take seriously the measurement and study
of that context.
It’s not just something that’s another characteristic of the individual; it’s a
characteristic that needs its own scientific integrity as a unit of analysis.
I’ll say more about that.
So we did a multimethod longitudinal study of neighborhoods.
You’ll see some of the results of this.
We did resident surveys, this is all original data collection, resident surveys,
observations, I’ll tell you what we did there, talked to leaders of organizations.
We also used other data that existed, such as census data, crime records, and
organizational records.
These studies were carried out roughly from 1995 to 2002, and then there were some
extensions as well.
The individual part, technically, it’s accelerated longitudinal design, but that doesn’t
sound very nice, so let’s just call it a suite of longitudinal cohort studies, multiple
cohort studies.
Starting from birth — we enrolled women when they were pregnant — or the kids were just
born, 3-year-olds, 6-year-olds, 9, 12, 15, 18, followed them through time, each cohort
followed through time.
Now, importantly, the cohort — and remember, we’re starting with this idea of neighborhood
is important, so we structured this multi- and again, I don’t want to get in too much
detail here, but it’s relatively straightforward — it’s a multistage sampling design
whereby we first pick the neighborhoods, stratify those by the key characteristics —and
you can see this, hopefully — black, white, Latino, and then mixed neighborhoods,
black/white, black/Latino, and then low income, medium income, high income.
And then we selected randomly within the strata the sample.
So you can see these neighborhoods are distributed all over Chicago and, when weighted,
represent the city.
So our kids are representative of those growing up in the city of Chicago in 1995, and
their families, and the neighborhoods are represented, and we studied the neighborhoods
separately. Okay? So that’s the design.
This shows you the diversity.
We wanted to get it and we got it.
It’s a very diverse sample by race, ethnicity, particularly the three largest groups, and
we also have, if you know, considerable diversity by immigration, lots of first and
second generation — well, not a lot, but relatively enough power anyway to look at
generational effects with regard to migration.
Now, this was a massive study and I have to give thanks to the staff that carried it out;
at one point, we had about 150 people that we hired, trained, and that worked in Chicago
in the West Loop for these seven years, and they did a yeoman’s job carrying out this
study.
People were followed wherever they moved in the United States and Mexico and, in some
cases, beyond.
This just gives you an example of, it’s really dark around Chicago because about 80% of
the sample stayed in the Chicago area, so they covered the entire city, moved out to the
suburbs, but they moved down the Mississippi to New York, some to Boston.
I don’t know if there’s one up there in Minnesota; I think there are some.
[Chuckles] So you might have some up there; who knows?
California, Texas, Florida, and we tracked them down and traced them, so it’s a true
longitudinal study.
I just wanted to give you a feel for that.