Sampson, Robert

Abstract

Robert Sampson is Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University and director of the social sciences program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He has published numerous articles and several books, most of which have a foundation in some aspect of community and disorder. His work has focused on urban violence, social inequalities, neighborhood influences on crime, and persistence and desistance in life‐course offending. His primary theoretical contributions have been a theory of the influence of neighborhood collective efficacy or the ability of residents to engage in collective action, based on mutual trust, on crime rates and an age‐graded life‐course theory of persistence and desistance in crime. He also has encouraged use of systematic social observation in addition to official statistics in analyzing the level of neighborhood disorder in theoretical work on community and crime.