Problems & Prospects Revisited: Bursik’s Mark on Chicago‐Style Criminology

Abstract

It has been 20 years since Robert J. Bursik Jr. published his seminal article outlining some of the problems and prospects in the social disorganization perspective on crime and delinquency. In this study, we review the content of approximately 200 published articles that cite Bursik’s 1988 piece. These studies are systematically examined in terms of their efforts to overcome the problems and pursue the prospects that Bursik outlined. In addition to content analysis, we survey the authors who cite this work. That is, we gather data from the authors directly to assess the influence of Bursik’s article on their own published work. Our research finds that Bursik’s work played a significant role in the revitalization and expansion of social disorganization theory.

Notes

1. The graphs in Figure 1 were computed using Web of Science citation counts. The subject keyword was the name of the theory closed by quotations, for example, social disorganization. Multiple theories were computed using OR as a connecting term—social learning OR differential association. Once the subject had been entered, the citations were subsequently limited to include only those sources under the sociology or criminology and penology categories. Although this method excludes citations such as books or articles that did not use search terms picked up in our sampling, it nonetheless uniformly excludes these types of publications across all examples, thus making comparisons between models possible.

2. A comprehensive list of all the studies used in this analysis can be obtained from the authors on request.

3. Although we acknowledge that by using only the authors who cited Bursik (1988) creates a bias in our sample, we feel that by using those authors who are most likely to be familiar with Bursik’s work, we can obtain a better picture of how the theory changed with respect to Bursik’s work.

4. We obtained an institutional review board (IRB) approval for our study prior to data collection and followed all required protocols for ethical research in our research design.