This week we continue reading the book Divergent Social Worlds by Peterson and Krivo. In general, this book examines racial and ethnic differences in neighborhood crime rates.
In the first two chapters that we read last week, they introduced their data collection effort (the National Neighborhood Crime Study, or NNCS), and they discussed some of the broad social forces that may explain racial differences in crime rates.
In the two chapters for this week, they take a closer look at the data. In chapter 3, they examine whether several structural characteristics of neighborhoods, such as poverty, unemployment, and residential mobility, vary across the average white, black, and Latino neighborhood.
In chapter 4, they examine whether differences in these characteristics might explain why black and Latino neighborhoods tend to have higher crime rates than white neighborhoods.
For this week’s discussion question, you need to present their answer to the latter question.
That is, do racial differences in the structural characteristics of neighborhoods fully explain why black and Latino neighborhoods tend to have higher crime rates than white neighborhoods?
In doing so, you need to draw on specific empirical findings from both chapters. You do not need to present all of their evidence, since it is very extensive. However, be sure to draw on several relevant findings from each chapter to support the overall conclusion.
