Forthcoming, American Journal of Public Health SOCIAL ANATOMY OF RACIAL AND ETHNIC DISPARITIES IN VIOLENCE

This article reports findings from a multilevel longitudinal study that brings together key individual, family, and neighborhood factors to assess the hypothesis that differential social contexts account for the puzzle of racial and ethnic gaps in violence. From 1995 to 2002 we collected three panels of data on a diverse sample of subjects (N= 2,974, ages 8-25) living in 180 Chicago neighborhoods, augmented by a separate community survey of 8,782 residents. The results show that the odds of violence are 85% higher for blacks compared to whites, whereas Latino violence is about 10% lower. Yet the majority of the black-white gap (over 60%) and the entire Latino-white gap are explained by a small set of factors, especially marital status of parents, immigrant generation, and neighborhood characteristics associated with racial segregation. Instead of targeting individuals or specific groups, the results imply that generic interventions to improve neighborhood conditions and support families may reduce racial gaps in violence. The public health of the United States has long been compromised by inequality in the burden of personal violence. African Americans are six times more likely to be murdered than whites, a crime that is overwhelmingly intra-racial in nature. Homicide also is the leading cause of death among young African Americans, and both police records and self-reported surveys show disproportionate involvement in serious violence among blacks. Surprisingly, however, Latinos experience lower rates of violence overall than blacks despite being generally poorer, and Latino rates have been converging with those of whites in recent years. These disparities remain a puzzle because scant empirical evidence bears directly on the explanation of differences in personal violence by race and ethnicity. Aggregate studies based on police statistics show that rates of violent crime are highest in disadvantaged communities that contain large concentrations of minority groups, but disparities in official crime may reflect biases in the way that criminal justice institutions treat different racial and ethnic groups rather than differences in actual offending. More important, aggregate and even multi-level studies typically do not account for correlated family or individual constitutional differences that might explain racial and ethnic disparities in violence. By contrast, individual-level studies tend to focus on characteristics of the offender while neglecting racial and ethnic differences associated with neighborhood contexts. Individual-level surveys of self-reported violence also underrepresent Latino Americans even though they are now the largest minority group in the United States. African Americans residing outside inner-city poverty areas tend to be underrepresented as well, even though there is a thriving and growing middle-class black population. Recognizing these limitations, two panels from the National Research Council and other major research groups called for new studies of racial and ethnic disparities in violent crime that integrate individual-level differences with a sample design that captures a variety of socioeconomic conditions and neighborhood contexts. We accomplish this objective in the 1 Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), a multi-level longitudinal cohort study that was conducted between 1995 and 2002. The study drew samples that capture the three major race/ethnic groups in American society today—whites, blacks, and Latinos —and that vary across a diverse set of environments, from highly segregated to very integrated neighborhoods. The analysis in this paper focuses on violent offending among participants ages 8 to 25. We also conducted an independent survey of the respondent’s neighborhoods, that, when supplemented with data from the U.S. Census and Chicago Police Department, provide a broad assessment of neighborhood characteristics to complement individual and family predictors. COMPETING EXPLANATIONS Our theoretical framework does not view “race” or “ethnicity” as holding distinct scientific credibility as causes of violence. Rather, we argue they are markers for a constellation of external and malleable social contexts that are differentially allocated by racial and ethnic status in American society. We hypothesize that segregation by these social contexts in turn differentially exposes members of racial and ethnic minority groups to key violenceinducing or violence-protecting conditions. We adjudicate empirically among three major contextual perspectives that we derive from a synthesis of prior research. First, the higher rate of violence among African Americans is often attributed to a matriarchal pattern of family structure; specifically, the prevalence of single-parent, femaleheaded families in the African-American community. Some have augmented this view by arguing that female-headed families are a response to structural conditions of poverty, especially the reduced pool of employed black men that could adequately support a family. A second view focuses on racial differences in family socioeconomic context. Many social scientists have posited that socioeconomic inequality – not family structure – is the root 2 cause of violence. Black female-headed families are spuriously linked to violence, by this logic, because of their lack of financial resources relative to two-parent families. A third perspective is that racial and ethnic minority groups in the United States are differentially exposed to salient neighborhood conditions, such as the geographic concentration of poverty and reduced informal community controls, which cannot be explained by personal or family circumstances. Prior research indicates that African Americans and, to a lesser extent, Latinos, are highly segregated residentially. Although never tested directly, the implication is that neighborhood segregation may explain individual race-ethnic gaps in violence. A prominent alternative to our approach highlights “constitutional” differences between individuals in impulsivity and intelligence (IQ). Although low IQ and impulsivity may be sturdy predictors of violence, their potential to explain race/ethnic disparities has rarely, if ever, been examined. We thus assess the constitutional hypothesis that race/ethnic differences in measured intelligence and impulsivity, more so than economic, family, or neighborhood social context, stand as explanations of the observed race/ethnic gaps in violence. DATA AND MEASURES The PHDCN employed a multi-stage sampling procedure where neighborhoods, families, and individual children were studied simultaneously. In the first stage, all 825 Chicago census tracts were stratified by racial/ethnic composition (seven categories) and SES (high, medium, and low), producing 21 strata. 180 tracts were selected randomly within strata. At the second stage, over 35,000 dwelling units were enumerated (or “listed”) in person by our research team within each area. In most instances all dwelling units were listed, but in particularly large tracts, census blocks were selected for listing with probability proportional to size. Within listed blocks, dwelling units were then selected systematically from a random start. All households were 3 enumerated within selected dwelling units and age-eligible participants were selected with certainty. To be age-eligible, a household member must have had an age within 12 months of one of seven ages: 0, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, and 18 years of age. Respondents and caregivers were interviewed in person up to three times from 1995-2002 in intervals of about 2.5 years. We study here the 2,974 respondents from the 9, 12, 15, and 18 year-old cohorts who completed the baseline interview (“wave 1” of the study). The initial response rate was 78%. Of the 2,974 wave 1 participants, 85% were interviewed again at wave 2 and 77% were interviewed at wave 3. We found no evidence that the association between race/ethnicity and violence at the initial interview varied as a function of future attrition (χ = 1.38, df = 5, p > .500). All analyses in this paper nonetheless control for attrition. Under a guarantee of confidentiality, all subjects were asked—at each interview— whether, during the last year, they (a) hit someone outside of the house, (b) threw objects such as rocks or bottles at people; (c) carried a hidden weapon; (d) maliciously set fire to a building, property, or car; (e) snatched a purse or picked a pocket; (f) attacked someone with a weapon; (g) used a weapon to rob someone; or (h) had been in a gang fight. Self-reported measures of violence have the major advantage of being independent of the biases of the criminal justice system (e.g., arrests). In addition, a body of research supports the reliability and validity across racial groups of the self-reported violence items included in our survey questionnaire. Measures of subjects’ race/ethnicity come from the primary caregiver (PC) interview for age cohorts 9, 12, and 15 and from the subject interview for cohort 18. We first identified subjects as Latino/non-Latino and then categorized them by country of ancestry as Mexican, Puerto Rican, or other Latino. We collapsed Puerto Ricans and other Latinos into a single category because of their relatively small sample sizes and similarity on sociodemographic characteristics and levels of violence. For non-Latinos, we then categorized race as being either 4 white, African American, or other. If the parents were of different races, then the subject’s race became the race of the mother. During the wave 2 interviews, all subjects were asked to selfidentify their racial and ethnic backgrounds. When compared with our classification of race/ethnicity at wave 1, we found that approximately 90 percent of subjects whom we identified as white, African American, or Latino at wave 1 self-reported the same classification at wave 2, validating our measurement scheme. In most cases where there was a discrepancy, the subject self-identified as being of mixed race/ethnicity at wave 2. To assess race/ethnic disparities we selected a set of risk factors that tap the core concepts derived from our theoretical framework and that are exogenous to violent behavior, meaning that they are determined prior to the onset of violence and are unlikely to be affected by violent offending. We thus proceed conservatively and do not control for mediating factors that might be outgrowths of participation in crime, such as drug use, affiliating with delinquent peers, or being a gang member. Research using such factors to explain racial disparities in violence begs the question of causal direction and confounds the “explainer” with the outcome. The following social-demographic and family background factors listed in Table 1 were measured at the initial interview: age, sex, socioeconomic status (first principal component of parent’s income, education, and occupational status), length of residence at address, immigrant generational status (1, 2, 3 or higher), whether adult extended kin live in household, number of children in household, four indicators of family structure, and the marital status of parent(s). To capture individual differences in “IQ” we measure verbal/reading ability from the average score of 9-15 year olds on the widely used Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) vocabulary test and the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT) reading test. The 18year-old cohort received the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) vocabulary test (or its Spanish version). We combined the vocabulary and reading scores using principal factor 5 estimation and regression scoring. We then normalized the resulting scale to a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. We constructed a scale of impulsivity (or hyperactivity) from the Achenbach Child-Behavior Check-List; these are based on reports of the primary care-giver for cohorts 9-15 and self-reports for cohort 18. Drawing on a large body of research linking impulsivity to crime, we averaged the following standardized items: Impulsive, acts without thinking; trouble concentrating or paying attention; cannot get mind off certain thoughts; cannot sit still, restless, hyperactive; confused or seems to be in a fog; demands a lot of attention; gets hurt a lot/accident-prone; nervous, high-strung, or tense; nervous movements or twitching; repeats certain acts over and over. These items produce a scale with an alpha reliability of .78. Using 1990 census data, and drawing on past work, we constructed three neighborhood characteristics for each census tract—concentrated disadvantage, residential stability, and percent professional/ managerial workers (see Table 1). We also examine neighborhood differences in racial/ethnic composition and immigrant concentration as measured in 1995 by aggregating the cohort samples; 1990 census data yielded similar results because of stability over time at the neighborhood level. To measure neighborhood social organization we incorporate a separate PHDCN community survey that yielded a representative probability sample of 8,782 Chicago residents in 1995, permitting construction of reliable between-neighborhood measures based on aggregating individual responses within the 175 neighborhoods that contain cohort respondents. Building on prior work we examine validated measures of collective efficacy, organizational services, social ties, and moral/legal cynicism (Table 1). We also examine the neighborhood’s prior violent crime rate, which we construct from incident-based records of the Chicago Police Department on murder, robbery, rate, and aggravated assault in 1993.