Library Briefings

Delinquency in Chicago neighborhoods

Data from new study now available

Data from a 2000-2002 large-scale, interdisciplinary study of how families, schools, and neighborhoods affect child and adolescent development, conducted by the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), has just been released and is archived at ICPSR. The project, according to the PHDCN, “examined the causes and pathways of juvenile delinquency, adult crime, substance abuse, and violence. At the same time, the project also provides a detailed look at the environments in which these social behaviors take place by collecting substantial amounts of data about urban Chicago, including its people, institutions, and resources.

"The project design consisted of two major components. The first was an intensive study of Chicago's neighborhood's, particularly the social, economic, organizational, political, and cultural structures and the dynamic changes that take place in the structures over time. The second component was a series of coordinated longitudinal studies that followed over 6,000 randomly selected children, adolescents, and young adults over time to examine the changing circumstances of their lives, as well as the personal characteristics, that might lead them toward or away from a variety of antisocial behaviors.

"PHDCN was directed from the Harvard School of Public Health, and funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, the National Institute of Mental Health, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Administration for Children, Youth and Families.”

Of interest to social science researchers from various disciplines, ICPSR is hosting the PHDCN web site to provide the research community with detailed methodological information about the study, the instruments, and the scales used in key analyses. Public-use files of the quantitative data are available for download as SAS, SPSS, or Stata files with the documentation available in PDF format. A newer service of ICPSR includes select public-use data are accessible through the online data analysis system.

Kathleen Murphy
Data Services Librarian
kemurphy@northwestern.edu