Kubrin, C. E., & Weitzer, R. (2003). Retaliatory homicide: Concentrated disadvantage and neighborhood culture. Social Problems , 50 (2), 157-180. https://doi.org/10.1525/sp.2003.50.2.157
Summary of the Article
The Topic Covered In the Article
The topic for this article is the high levels of black-on-black violence in the United States. Most of the researcher who tries to study the causes of violent crime finds it challenging to explain the violence in question. The lower-class communities in the US create a unique moral universe, legitimating and glorifying hostile behavior, specifically among male teenagers. Consequently, this “subculture” becomes self-perpetuating in these societies. As a result, these behaviors are the reason there are high homicide rates in disadvantaged communities.
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The Main Contribution of the Study
However, in the recent past, most researchers have started addressing both cultural and structural dimensions of crime and race. As a result, the article offers its contribution by examining cultural and structural effects related to retaliatory homicides in St. Louis neighborhoods.
Conceptualization of the Primary Concepts in the Study
In creating the study concepts, the article focuses on analyzing different prior theories, scrutinize their strengths and weaknesses. For instance, the report states that the subcultural approach fails to explain why violent subcultures resonate in specific groups and not others. Additionally, the approach doesn’t explain why the subcultures in question are more robust in specific geographical areas than others. It failed to address these issues adequately makes it inefficient.
Study Methodology
The research employed qualitative and quantitative data to scrutinize the difficulty of retaliatory homicide connection. The quantifiable data was used to address social-economic correlates associated questions. Also, it was used to manage retaliatory homicide ecological distribution. Conversely, the qualitative information demonstrates how regional social codes evident themselves in encounters resulting in retaliatory killings.
The data was obtained from the St. Louis Homicide data set, which encompasses 2,161 homicides, which happened in St. Louis between 1985-1995. The information was collected from the recordings. For instance, trained coders were used to hand-code all the data from police files. Consequently, a regression analysis was performed exhausting 1990 Census information for St. Louis city. This analysis assisted in examining if the neighborhood disadvantage is related to the retaliatory homicide.
The Conclusions
In conclusion, the study findings demonstrated the significance of the two neighborhood context dimensions, subcultural support for violence and structural disadvantage, to understand retaliatory homicide patterns. The results indicated that cultural retaliatory homicide is distributed across St. Louis unevenly. Additionally, the homicide in question is concentrated in socially-economically disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Critical Assessment of the Article
Although the study was well conducted, it had limited access to data. The review was only dependent on one source of data, the St. Louis Homicide Data Set. The set only confined data on 2,161 homicides that took place for ten years. This limitation might have hindered the research effectiveness. In other samples, interviews and questionnaires are conducted to provide the researchers with first-hand information.
As a result, the conceptualization of the study’s primary concepts might have been ineffective due to a lack of adequate and first-hand information. If the introductory concepts were conceptualized differently, the findings would have been more accurate and useful. The use of first-hand knowledge is essential because it could have been gained directly, thus giving a chance to ask for clarifications.
Findings Similarities and Dissimilarities with Other Articles
The findings in this study were similar to the results found in other articles in numerous ways. For instance, the products in this study were based on facts. The study ensured that there were no causal inferences were made. However, the results obtained were biased because the analysis was affected by simultaneity bias. There was no homicide levels effect control on the neighborhood instability and disadvantage indicators.
The theoretical framework of this study was efficient in supporting the research study theory. It introduced and described the theory that explains the existence of the research problem under the study. Arguably, all the necessary theoretical frameworks were effectively applied in this study.
