@article {48426,
	title = {The Place of Context: A Theory and Strategy for Criminology{\textquoteright}s Hard Problems},
	journal = {Criminology},
	volume = {51},
	year = {2013},
	pages = {1-31},
	abstract = {I present a theoretical framework and analytic strategy for the study of place as a fundamental context in criminology, with a focus on neighborhood effects. My approach builds on the past 15 years of research from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and from a recent book unifying the results. I argue that {\textquotedblleft}ecometrics{\textquotedblright} can be applied at multiple scales, and I elaborate core principles and guiding hypotheses for five problems: 1) legacies of inequality and developmental neighborhood effects; 2) race, crime, and the new diversity; 3) cognition and context, above all the social meaning of disorder; 4) the measurement and sources of collective efficacy in a cosmopolitan world; and 5) higher order structures beyond the neighborhood that arise in complex urban systems. Although conceptually distinct, these hard problems are interdependent and ultimately linked to a frontier in criminology: contextual causality.},
	url = {http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9125.12002/abstract},
	author = {Robert J. Sampson}
}
