Urban Danger - Life in a Neighborhood of Strangers

• NCJ Number: 79698
• Author(s): S E Merry
• Date Published: 1981
• Length: 270 pages
• Grant Number(s): 1 F31 MH05088-01
• Sponsoring Agency: US Dept of Health, Education, and Welfare
• Sale Source: Temple University Press
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

Findings are presented from research that explored the different ways people from various ethnic backgrounds in a high-crime urban environment perceive danger.

Abstract

The researcher spent 18 months talking to members of 300 families residing in a high-crime multiethnic housing project in a major American city. The housing project was about 52 percent Chinese, 27 percent black, 12 percent white, and 6 percent Hispanic. An explanation of the study's methodology and the particular problems of ethnography in an urban setting precedes a description of the social structure of the housing project, along with the nature of the social networks that bind and divide the residents. Detailed portraits of four families, including the family of a youth steeped in the lore of local crime, provide a means of exploring the diverse social and cultural worlds of the project residents. Another chapter focuses on how the ethnic groups relate to one another, the nature of the boundaries to social relationships in the project, and the role of these boundaries and cultural differences in determining strangers' perceptions of one another. Also analyzed are the way project ethnic and social groups conceptualize danger, the way cognitive 'maps' are created and revised, and the kinds of harm feared by different social and ethnic groups. Strategies residents develop to manage their hazardous environment are delineated, with attention to the techniques of those who commit crimes as well as those who try to avoid them. In a cross-cultural and historical survey of attitudes toward danger, the book argues that awareness of danger springs from certain features of the social structure of the large, industrial, heterogeneous city, and a theory is developed to account for the conditions under which danger becomes a major political and social issue. The concluding discussion deals with the generality of the study findings by comparing them with the findings of other urban ethnographic studies in similar neighborhoods. Tabular data are appended; about 150 bibliographic listings and an index are provided. (Author summary modified)