Steven F. Messner's Research Projects

Criminal Victimization in Contemporary Urban China

• This research examines the determinants of individual risks of criminal victimization and neighborhood levels of crime with original survey data collected in the city of Tianjin, China. The project entails collaboration between researchers from U. S. institutions and members of the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences.

Multi-level Analyses of Proactive Policing and Violent Crime

• This study replicates and extends prior work that has examined the effect of proactive policing on robbery rates for samples of U. S. cities. The research introduces a multi-level framework, conceptualizing cities as nested within states. The analyses assess how proactive policing and other city-level characteristics operate in concert with state-level characteristics to affect robbery rates.

Lynching and Contemporary Southern Homicide

• This research assesses the extent to which the legacy of lynching influences current levels of homicide within the South. Drawing upon literature on the brutalizing effects of capital punishment and the emergence of "self-help" traditions in the absence of access to formal law, hypotheses are formulated relating lynching to homicide offending for whites and blacks. These hypotheses are tested in negative binomial regression analyses.