Religious Contexts and Serious Violence Among Latinos and Asians, 2010

Goals and Objectives: Though criminological research and policy practitioners have given significant attention to the structural and demographic characteristics associated with serious violence across communities, much less attention has been given to the socio-cultural- including religious contextual features that impact violent offending, victimization, and lethal self-harm. Thus, the goal of the proposed project is to construct a large-scale database to examine the religious contextual correlates of race/ethnic-specific violence. In particular, because of their omission in most prior research (including racially-disaggregated analyses), we propose to explore the macro-social and religious contextual correlates of Latino and Asian violence (including suicide) as they compare to those of other racial and ethnic groups.

Research Design and Methods: We propose to draw data from the Centers for Disease Control and: Prevention (CDC) mortality files (years 2008-2012), the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program "offenses known" files, and Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR), to pair with key independent variables drawn from the Religious Congregations and Membership Survey (RCMS) and both the decennial Census and the American Community Survey.

Analysis: Using these data, we will conduct both descriptive and multivariate analyses, including F-tests (Wald tests) to make inter-group/inter-model comparisons, negative binomial regression to analyze our dependent variables, and mediation models to fully parse out the direct and indirect, effects of our variables. Throughout this process, we will employ sensitivity analyses, including robustness checks for sample selection and model construction.

Products/Reports/Archiving: The study will produce several articles for presentation at conferences and academic publication, while also submitting reports to practitioner journals to attract a broader audience. Additionally, a "Research Brief' will be created for criminal justice practitioners aiming to alleviate associated criminogenic conditions most closely linked to race/ethnic-specific violence.

This project contains a research and/or development component, as defined in applicable law.

ca/ncf