Qualitative assessment for 1 The Sociological Perspective

If you choose to do this qualitative assessment for unit 1: The Sociological Perspective, here is the assignment.

General assignment:

This is due one week from today.

For the first assessment, please demonstrate that you can find a sociology research article.  Then, use that article to demonstrate that you understand the sociological perspective and how sociologists do research.  Below are specific questions that you should answer.  

(1 Point each for 1a and 1b):

1a.  Cite your article. 

The American Sociological Association (ASA) has its own format and style guide, but they charge you for the book, so I will show you where to find out how to cite using ASA style below.  ASA style is used less so it is a little harder to find; for example, you can find general help about how to cite from  LUC's libraries here, but it does not include ASA style.  The format for journal articles like those we did in class looks like this: 

 Author Last Name, Author First Name. Year Published. 'Title'. Publication Title  Volume number(Issue number):Pages Used. Retrieved October 10, 2013 (http://Website URL).

If you need more detail than what is above, use one of these other guides:

• Cite This For Me will create citations for you with the citation generator but it also has numerous guides to citing.  https://www.citethisforme.com/citation-generator/asa/how-to-cite-journal
• Purdue Online Writing Lab is really useful.  It has a citation guide here, and the home page is here.
• Harvard has a guide to ASA style.
• UNK has a guide here.

Lastly, Pro Tip - if you use JSTOR for research, the database has a citation generator.  If you have a resource open like a journal and you click citation, it will generate it for you (but check on the format).

1b.  Please include a link to the article so that I can click on it.

2.  Explain how this research can be an example of the sociological perspective.   

Use ONE - either Berger's idea of Social Construction of Reality or Mill's idea of the Sociological Imagination  and explain both: (a)what their idea is and (b)how that idea might apply to the research article.

3.  Explain one of the paradigms.

Choose ONE paradigm: Durkheim's Structural Functional, Marx's Conflict, or Weber's Symbolic Interaction and briefly explain the paradigm and then illustrate how the research looks through the lens of that paradigm.

4.  Explain the type of research.  

We learned about both the general types and specific methods of research that sociologists use.  What general type(s) of research (qualitative, quantitative, longitudinal, cross sectional, etc...) does the author use and why/how do you know?  Then explain what particular method(s) the author uses.  How did they gather their data?  (HINT: Do not confuse the background literature review for the actual research)

5. Explain the conclusions of the research.

What groups/categories are the authors studying?  What conclusions/generalizations do they come to and why are these not stereotypes (explain the difference)? Finally, why should we be careful of how we view outgroups and what might this research shed light on to prevent either outgroup homogeneity or outgroup stereotypes?

6. Critically analyze the article.

What are some of the general ways of being critical about research or statistics in general?  What are some specific ways of being critical of this article's statistics or claims?  Lastly, is this article (or its conclusions) interesting enough that I should use it in my regular lessons (if we cover the topic) for all students to see?

Tips and Recommendations:

• Use a separate app to write and save your responses (such as Word or Google Docs).  Then, to TURN IN the assessment, paste your answers HERE using this Google form.
• Start making an outline ASAP so that if you have questions, next week you have time to get help.
• Be sure to answer ALL parts of each question. 
• If you have trouble, please do not fret alone:
• Use Loyola’s writing center.
• Find me (helpful if you email me a heads up) in Coffey room 418 Usually I am there from 9:15 - 9:45 and then again from 1-2pm.
• Or we can communicate via email, zoom or make an appointment to meet in person.

Grading

6 points each for questions 2- 6 using the scale below:

6 All parts of the question are complete and accurate.

5 answer is slightly either inadequate or inaccurate.

4 answer is either seriously inadequate or inaccurate OR slightly both inadequate or inaccurate.

3 answer is seriously inadequate or inaccurate AND slightly inadequate or inaccurate.

2 answer is BOTH seriously inadequate AND inaccurate.

1 answer shows an attempt to answer but is completely inaccurate.

0 there was no answer provided or answer shows contempt for the course or teacher and/or a lack of seriousness.

Meditation: Listen for the constant change.

Listen for the constant change. 

It is easy for us to hear the bell ring when it is hit and we notice the bell go silent.  But in between, the bell is constantly changing.  Listen for the constant change.  

This is like our everyday life.  It is constantly changing.  Every moment is different.  If you are having a rough day, week or semester, the next moment is different.  Let yourself be born anew in this present moment. 

From The Marginalian, Maria Popover writes,

In the opening pages of her 1993 masterwork Parable of the Sower (public library) — the first part of her oracular Earthseed allegory — Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) writes:

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

And from Tiny Buddha:

 

“No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.” ~ Hal Borland

From the Joy Within:

From Charlotte Bell at Hugger Mugger:

I have the great privilege of teaching a mindfulness class each week for Huntsman Cancer Institute. The class takes place at Salt Lake City’s gorgeous Red Butte Garden. I recently bought a new 85mm macro lens for my Nikon d7500. Red Butte Garden is the perfect place to play with the lens after class. I love the elaborate detail that emerges when I shoot things close up. Sometimes when a particular plant really shines through my lens, I think about different ways I might approach it the following week. Then the next week rolls around and often that flower is gone, only to be replaced by some other gorgeous bloom. Going to the garden is a weekly reminder of the truth of constant change.

A group of meditation teachers once asked Suzuki Roshi, author of the mindfulness classic, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, to sum up meditation in one sentence. His answer: “Everything changes.” It’s easy to see the truth of constant change in our lives. We can observe the evolution of our bodies throughout our lives. We can reflect on changes in our preferences and habits. What I enjoyed in my 20s is vastly different from what I enjoy now. Sometimes the cycles of constant change can be challenging. It can be hard to let go of things we love. At other times, we welcome change.
CONSTANT CHANGE IS NOT A CHOICE

The changes that characterize our lives are often beyond our control. For example, we can’t stop the aging process. Relationships change, often without our input. Friends, family and animal companions come and go. We can’t stop these changes from happening. But we can choose how we respond. We can choose whether or not constant change throws us off balance—which it most certainly will at times. Or we can remember that the difficulties we experience in response to change will themselves change at some point.

When we’re happy with the conditions in our lives, we often wish they wouldn’t change. When they inevitably do change, we suffer. Have you ever taken a vacation and wished it would never end? Wanting your situation to be different keeps you from enjoying where you are.

When we’re not so happy with what’s happening in our lives, we respond with aversion. Have you ever gotten angry at being stopped by a stoplight? Have you ever sat in your car, stewing about it until the light changes? This is how we add unnecessary suffering onto a basically neutral situation. It may not be our preference to have to stop, but is it worth getting worked up?

These responses are natural, but they can sometimes layer even more angst onto the situation. Our choice then becomes whether we react with clinging or aversion, or whether we recognize that our present situation is temporary and relax into it as much as possible.

The situations I cited above are relatively easy. Of course, there are pleasant and unpleasant situations that are much more challenging in our lives. But we can practice moderating our responses in these less challenging times, so that when bigger challenges arise, perhaps we can respond more skillfully. That’s what practice is about.
HOW MINDFULNESS HELPS US TUNE IN TO CHANGE

We can also practice moderating our responses in meditation. In the same way my macro lens reveals tiny details in the flowers I shoot, mindfulness gives us an intimate look at constant change.

Try this: Place your hands together. You can interlace your fingers, place your hands in Anjali Mudraor touch your fingertips together—whatever you prefer. Now tune into the sensations in the hands. What do you feel? Maybe there are sensations of warmth, coolness, pressure, pulsing or vibration, or something else entirely. Do these sensations stay constant, or do they continuously change? Practice this inquiry for at least 3 to 5 minutes.

When we look closely at what appears to be constant contact between our hands, we can begin to see that the sensations are actually constantly changing. Contact between our hands is not just one thing; it’s a panoply of changing sensations.

This is a microscopic look into what is happening all the time in our lives. In mindfulness practice, we can observe sensations coming and going at very subtle levels. Eventually, we become less reactive as we become more comfortable with the inevitability of change. When we practice mindfulness, we rest in the flow of constant change in our bodies. It becomes familiar enough that we no longer see change as a problem, but rather simply as the natural state of our lives.

Practicing mindfulness is kind of like a musician practicing scales. You practice scales and arpeggios so that you develop facility with combinations of notes that you will likely encounter when you play music. When we learn to rest in the flow of constant change, we become better able to respond skillfully to the bigger changes we experience every day of our lives.

2.1 Nature AND Nurture and Socialization

  HW:  Levine, Robert and Wolff, Ellen.  Social Time: The Heartbeat of Culture.  Psychology Today. 1985.          

Google Form for this lesson

1.  What are some of the unseen ways that the tree below has been shaped?

There are two general categories of influences on the tree: Nature and Nurture.

The Nature and Nurture Dynamic

The tree begins with a seed that houses the tree's genetic material, an algorithm for how the tree should grow.  But the rules of the algorithm interact with the environment that the seed lands in.  For example, the tree's genes are programmed to grow towards the sunlight, but that depends upon what is around the tree and what happens to the tree.

The genetic material in the ash tree seeds creates an aptitude for the tree to grow like this:

Both of the ash trees above start from seeds like the ones pictured above. The seeds provide an aptitude for the tree to grow.  The aptitude is the tree's potential for traits like height, branching, lifespan, etc...  This is the tree's nature; its genes and biology.  But this aptitude is dependent on the nurture that the tree gets from its environment; the tree is affected by its surroundings:

• the light it receives
• its surroundings like buildings and other trees
• the soil composition
• pollution
• animals and insects nesting/affecting in the tree
• And the tree is also affected by human activity:

• pruning
• fertilizing 
• people driving by the tree with trucks hitting the branches  

All of the effects of the surroundings of the tree and the human activity is nurture; how interaction with surroundings and people affect growth.  So the tree's growth is based on a dynamic interaction between both its nature and its nurture.  

The poem below was written by Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman who was a sociology major from Harvard. (She also wrote and read The Hill We Climb, the poem at the 2021 Presidential Inauguration). You can read more about her and hear her recite her poetry on this 2021 post from the NY Magazine.

 Arborescent I

by

Amanda Gorman

We are
        Arborescent-
What goes
        Unseen
Is at the very
        Root of ourselves.
Distance can
        Distort our deepest
Sense
        Of who
We are,
        Leave Us
Warped
        & wasted
As winter's
        Wind. We will
Not Walk
        From what
We've borne
        We would
Keep it
        For a while
Sit silent &
        Swinging on its branches
Like a child
        Refusing to come
Home. We would
        Keep.
Knowing how
        We would
Again
        Give up
Our World
        For this one.

2a. What does Gorman mean by "We are arborescent"?
2b. What are some things that "go unseen" that are "at the very root of ourselves"?

This lesson is the beginning of our second unit - Social Structure.  For this unit, I want students to be able to answer the question: How has social structure shaped you? To begin this unit, this lesson will first examine evidence about how humans are programmed by their DNA and biology.  If we are programmed to grow/be/act a certain way then that is not social structure, that is biology.  Let's begin with an examination of biology v. society or nature v. nurture so that we can separate out what is social influence on people.

Like Gorman explains in her poem, people are like trees as well.  Humans are born with biological nature - genes that provide an aptitude and a road map for growth.  In other words, all living creatures from trees to humans are dependent on both nature and nurture. But humans are affected by their surroundings - their environment including both the physical environment and the social environment.  Similar to trees, many animals are born with instincts and abilities to survive on their own.   

Human Nature

But people are different than trees and animals in profound ways.  If a tree's seed falls to the ground and takes root, left to itself, it grows.  But if a human baby is born, left to itself, it is unlikely to survive.  In other words, humans are deeply interdependent on other humans to survive.  In other words,  it is human nature to be nurtured.  Humans need to be cared for, and that is why we are born with a biology and a psychology designed for social interaction.  

Evidence for the connection between nature and nurture and the human social connection:

Neurobiology and psychology

• mirror neurons
• vagus nerve
• facial recognition
• language
• oxytocin

From Our World in Data,  

Dr. Vivek Murthy, Surgeon General of the United States, recently wrote: “Loneliness and weak social connections are associated with a reduction in lifespan similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day”.

From the National Institutes of Health,

Social relationships—both quantity and quality—affect mental health, health behavior, physical health, and mortality risk. Sociologists have played a central role in establishing the link between social relationships and health outcomes, identifying explanations for this link, and discovering social variation (e.g., by gender and race) at the population level. Studies show that social relationships have short- and long-term effects on health, for better and for worse, and that these effects emerge in childhood and cascade throughout life to foster cumulative advantage or disadvantage in health. This article describes key research themes in the study of social relationships and health, and it highlights policy implications suggested by this research.

From Harvard Medical School,

Social connections like these not only give us pleasure, they also influence our long-term health in ways every bit as powerful as adequate sleep, a good diet, and not smoking. Dozens of studies have shown that people who have social support from family, friends, and their community are happier, have fewer health problems, and live longer.

Dean Ornish's Reaserch

 

Dr. Dean Ornish, a cardiologist who found through research that patients with medical issues, including surgeries like bypass surgery or mastectomies, healed quicker and more thoroughly if they had meaningful relationships in their lives. 

From Dr. Ornish's website:

At the Heart of Healing: Connection

Loneliness and Isolation

Medicine today tends to focus primarily on the physical and mechanistic: drugs and surgery, genes and germs, microbes and molecules. However, there isn’t any other factor in medicine – not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery – that has a greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness and premature death from all causes than loneliness and isolation.

Love and intimacy — our ability to connect with ourselves and others, is at the root of what makes us sick and what makes us well, what causes sadness and what brings happiness, what makes us suffer and what leads to healing. If a new drug had the same impact, virtually every doctor in the country would be recommending it for his or her patients. It would be malpractice not to prescribe it — yet, with few exceptions, we doctors do not learn much about the healing power of love, intimacy, and transformation in our medical training.

There is a deep spiritual hunger in this country. The real epidemic in our culture is not only physical heart disease, but also what I call emotional and spiritual heart disease. The profound sense of loneliness, isolation, alienation, and depression that are so prevalent in our culture with the breakdown of the social structures that used to provide us with a sense of connection and community. It is, to me, a root of the illness, cynicism, and violence in our society.

We are creatures of community. Those individuals, societies, and cultures who learned to take care of each other, to love each other, and to nurture relationships with each other during the past several hundred thousand years were more likely to survive than those who did not. Those people who did not learn to take care of each other often did not make it. In our culture, the idea of spending time taking care of each other and creating communities has become increasingly rare. Ignoring these ideas imperils our survival.

Awareness is the first step in healing, both individually and socially. Part of the value of science is to increase the level of awareness of how much these choices matter that we make each day. Not just a little, but a lot, and not just to the quality of life but also the quantity of life – to our survival. When we understand how important these issues are, then we can do something about it. These include:

• spending more time with our friends and family

• communication skills 

• group support

• confession, forgiveness, and redemption 

• compassion, altruism, and service 

• psychotherapy 

• touching

• commitment

• meditation

When we increase the love and intimacy in our lives, we also increase the health, joy, and meaning in our lives.

Blueprint by Nicholas Christakis

Nicholas Christakis is a sociologist and medical doctor.  In his 2019 book, Blueprint, he explains that humans are born with a nature that makes us be nurtured.  This is what Christakis calls the "social suite:"

“At the core of all societies, I will show, is the social suite: 

(1) The capacity to have and recognize individual identity
(2) Love for partners and offspring
(3) Friendship
(4) Social networks
(5) Cooperation
(6) Preference for one’s own group (that is, “in-group bias”)
(7) Mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism
(8) Social learning and teaching”

 

 

Watch Christakis briefly summarize his book on youtube here or on the embedded video below:

For more info., Christakis has a 30 min interview with the RSA here that explains how his work can inform us during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Bruce Perry's Research

Another researcher,  Bruce Perry,  has written extensively about the importance of nurturing humans as they grow, especially empathy.  Perry's research details the sad evidence that humans who are not nurtured by other humans will not grow and develop. There are numerous examples of kids who are fed and protected so that they survive, but they are isolated from other people and not shown love and caring.  Humans need more than nutrition and shelter to grow and develop.  

Watch both of the videos below about famous examples that are as revealing as they are sad:

• Danielle, found in 2004.

Watch this video from the Oprah show which summarizes her initial finding and then updates how she is ten years later.   Ten years after she was found, the Tampa Bay Time did an update on her here.

    

• Genie, found in 1970.  

The video below is about a girl named Genie that was locked in a bedroom alone for 12 years of her life. Here is what Susan Curtiss wrote about her in her book, Genie; A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day Wild Child.

Here is a brief clip from a documentary about Genie's story. And below are notes from one of the researchers studying Genie:

Genie was pitiful. Hardly ever having worn clothing, she did not react to temperature, either heat or cold. Never having eaten solid food, Genie did not know how to chew and had great difficulty in swallowing.  Having been strapped down and left sitting on a potty chair she could not stand erect, could not straighten her arms or legs, could not run hop, jump or climb.  In fact she could only walk with difficulty shuffling her feet and swaying from side to side. Hardly ever having seen more than a space of ten feet in front of her she had become nearsighted to exactly that distance....Surprisingly, however, Genie was alert and curious. She maintained good eye contact and...She was intensely eager for human contact. 

3. What are the ways that Danielle and Genie both were not nurtured?

4.  What are some of the results of their lack of nurturing?

Feral Kids

Some people have been found to be living with wild (feral) animals.  These feral people provide more evidence that humans are influenced by their surroundings.  Check out this website for examples of feral children.

 

Socialization before birth!

The process of nurture that shapes humans is called socialization.  There is evidence that this process begins even before birth!  Even before birth, a baby is dependent on its parents for its genes.  And then, as it develops in utero, it depends on its mother to make the baby's life viable; A prenatal infant can be impacted by the stress that the mother feels as well as the nutrition she gets, and the medical care she receives.

• This Ted Talk by Annie Murphy Paul explains some of the ways that humans begin learning before birth!
• Another example of prenatal socialization is in identical twins who have the same exact DNA and biology.  Because they are exactly the same, nurses will often paint the nails of twins differently so that they can quickly tell them apart.  But, often the parents of these twins can tell them apart from their earliest days because they have already started developing different personalities even before being born.
• The effects of alcohol and drugs on unborn babies are one example of prenatal effects on unborn babies that are well documented.  Additionally, other examples are the effects of prenatal vitamins and stress on the mother.  
• Yet another example of socialization happening in utero is that babies are influenced by what mothers eat during their pregnancy.  One study shows that the amniotic fluid around the baby can take on the flavor and smell of certain foods or spices.  Babies show a correlation to those foods after being born.  See more about this study here.
• There is even more recent research that has found that the experiences a grandmother has can affect the genes that she passes down to her grandchild!  In other words, the nurturing or socialization process that affects you, might start decades before you are even born!  This multigenerational effect on genes is known as epigenetics.   Here is a link to a PBS program called The Ghost in your Genes about epigenetics.  The researchers theorize that social experiences can affect the genes of a person and, more amazingly, these genes can be passed down to a generation or two. So the grandchildren may experience the effects of their grandparents' lives on their genes. How amazing is that? They call it the "ghost in your genes," explained on the BBC here.

Can you explain what sociologist mean by nature and nurture?

What is the dynamic between the two?

Use evidence from the lesson above to support your answer.

1.9 Quantitative Assessment Unit 1

Don't be too anxious - you can always submit a qualitative assessment.  

The assessment will be posted to Sakai under the Tests/quizzes tab at the start of today's class.

You must take this assessment before the beginning of our next class.

Be mindful of the time - once you begin, you have 75 minutes to finish.  There are readings and that may take you a little bit of time.

Please do not share any answers, but you may use your notes to answer the questions.

You are NOT allowed to skip questions.

 

When finished with the assessment, please answer this Post-assessment evaluation.

1.09 Statistics and Critical Thinking

As students enter, please look over the reading by Joel Best, "The Truth about Damned Lies and Statistics." 

Be ready to answer questions about the reading.

Here is the Google Form for students who are absent.

Small group discussion of reading.
1. What's the problem with the statistic about children killed by guns? 

2.  According to Best, what are the 2 harmful ways that people view statistics? 

3.  How does Best say people should view statistics? 

Operationalizing terms

4.  Rather than viewing a statistic's flaws, how does Best say that people should be thoughtful about statistics? 

How to be critical of statistics/research:

Ask questions.

Don't just accept the data but ask where it came from.

Look for a section (usually at the end) called Discussion or Limitations;  usually, authors are critical of their own work.

Apply:  Best's reading to your own research.

Individually

5.  What statistics or claims are in the research that you found?  Apply some of Best's suggestions to statistics from your research article.

Watch this humorous take on science and stats from John Oliver.

 

Applying Critical Thinking to the "crisis at the border" or "migrants" click here.

Applying Critical Thinking to Violence in Chicago click here

Applying Critical Thinking to gun deaths and Mass Shootings

Examining Statistics in Sociology (and generally) requires critical thinking.  By critical, I mean being detailed and inquisitive about the stats.  For example, let's examine the following claim that we hear often (and many of us or our parents may even have said).

Claim:  There is a lot of violence in Chicago.

6.  How can we be critical of this claim; what questions would you ask before accepting this claim as fact?  What details would you want to know?

Research this claim critically.  In small groups try to examine this claim critically and then explain your finds to the class.  What nuances should we know before making this claim?

Remember that statistics are rhetorical - they must be defined and explained by words.

Here is a great example of critical assessment from the Chicago Reader,

From the way CPD has presented the numbers it’s not at all clear how many of the 1,127 arrests were actually related to last year’s 1,417 carjacking cases. Deenihan didn’t explain that oftentimes CPD arrests multiple people related to a single carjacking incident, nor did he mention how many of those arrests were for incidents that happened in prior years. In a table breaking down arrestees’ age ranges in five-year increments, the 15-20 age group was indeed the largest in 2020. More than half of the people arrested, however, were actually over the age of 20.

While carjacking had spiked, last year saw 21,567 fewer robberies, burglaries, and thefts compared to 2019. This was part of a yearslong trend in the decline of these types of crimes. About 18,000 parked, unattended cars are stolen every year in Illinois, and that hadn’t become more common in 2020; CPD claims that these days cars are easier to steal because many people leave their key fobs in their vehicles. “Meanwhile this one uptick in this one subcategory of robbery had story after story and press conference after press conference,” she remarked about carjacking. 

Here are some sites to help you:

Cross-Cultural Research

Statista ranks the most violent countries in the world here.

Statista ranks the most violent cities in the world.

From Bloomberg, Gun Violence in US Cities Compared to the Deadliest Nations in the World (2013):

Cross-sectional Research on Crime Within the United States

A critical analysis of post-pandemic violent crime rates from the Brennan Center for Criminal Justice (2023) shows that understanding crime rates is complex and requires a critical analysis.

Reported violent crime per capita by state from Statista

Violent crime is generally contrasted with property crime, with the latter defined as the taking of money or property without force (or the threat of force) against the victims. Note that in these definitions, robbery counts as violent crime whereas burglary does not. Comparing the the number of committed crimes in U.S. by category, property crime far outnumbers violent crime, while aggravated assault accounts for some two-thirds of all violent crime.

Crime per capita by state from World Population Review

Crime overall is relatively low in Illinois and the homicide rate is middle of the pack.

Gun deaths by state from World Population Review

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/gun-deaths-by-state

Firearm deaths by state from CDC

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/firearm.htm

Cross Sectional Research within Chicago

Mixed methods study (2023) from Brookings Institution including qualitative analysis highlights the differences between actual crime and perception of crime as well as violent crime and non-violent crime comparing Chicago to three other large U.S. cities.

Longitudinal Data

Crime in Chicago; What Does the Research Tell Us? from Northwestern U.

https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/news/2018/crime-in-chicago-research.html

The violence was also extremely concentrated. Skogan said 50 percent of all the shootings in 2016 occurred in just a handful of neighborhoods, including Austin, Garfield Park, North and South Lawndale, Englewood, and West Pullman. The crime is even more concentrated in those communities, often occurring within just a few blocks. There is one four-by-four block area in Humboldt Park, Skogan said, that has been in the top 5 percent of shootings in the city every year for 27 years. 

Note that the crime rate has not spiked generally for all Chicagoans.  As the graph above and the text above that explains, the crime is particularly high in smaller communities within Chicago.

From PBS, What U of Chicago Crime Lab Data says about Chicago crime

The Chicago Police Department reports 661 murders occurred as of Dec. 10, 2022, down 15% from 2021 when the tally was 776. Overall shootings are also reported as down by about 20% from 2021 numbers, from 3,399 to 2,718. But reported incidents of motor vehicle theft have nearly doubled from 2021, from 9,933 to 19,238. Theft numbers also showed a steep increase.

From Crain's Chicago Business; All Big Cities Have a Violence Problem. Chicago's is Different (2022):

How safe is Chicago? The answer depends on where you're standing.

The North Side is as safe as it's been in a generation, with a homicide rate that has declined steadily throughout this century, barely ticking up during the especially violent years of 2016 and 2020, then falling again in 2021, even as the city as a whole experienced its bloodiest year since the mid-1990s, according to Chicago Police Department data.

The homicide rate for the city’s four North Side police districts (the 18th, 19th, 20th and 24th) last year was 3.2 residents per 100,000, according to analysis of data from the University of Chicago Crime Lab—lower than Evanston’s, Champaign’s and Springfield’s, based on data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Overall, Chicago’s per-capita murder rate is higher than in New York City or Los Angeles, but is lower than in Midwestern cities such as Detroit, Milwaukee and St. Louis.

Qualitative Understanding of Violent Crime

Supreme Court narrows definition of violent crime

What is "violent" crime? Does armed robbery count?

FBI Uniform Report

The FBI categorizes violent crime as, "violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Violent crimes are defined in the UCR Program as those offenses that involve force or threat of force."

Cross-Cultural Comparison of Chicago to Other Big Cities

The Council on Criminal Justice published this 2022 study of The Pandemic, Social Unrest and Crime in U.S. Big Cities.

Here is crime data from the City of Chicago:

Here is crime data from the City of Chicago.

Here is crime data from Chicago Police Department.

Here is crime data from the City of Chicago.

Here is the City of Chicago Crime Map

Why People Misperceive Crime Trends (Chicago Is Not the Murder Capital) from the NYT Upshot (2021)

In Conclusion:

How should we think about statistics in research articles?

What does it mean to think critically?

Reviewing Unit 1:

Is the data above macrosociology  or microsociology?  Why?

What would data look like that is the opposite?

What questions would a structural functional sociologist ask about the data above?

What questions would a sociologist ask about the data above using the conflict paradigm?

What questions would a symbolic interactionist sociologist ask about the data above?

What conclusions might you make about the data above using a sociological imagination?

How might the data above apply to the social construction of reality?