Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: While much research has explored the relationship between participation in sports and individual criminality, little research has explored the relationship between sporting events and neighborhood crime. While sports may benefit participants by reducing their criminal behavior, sporting events may actually be a detriment to surrounding neighborhoods in terms of increased crime as event attendees may overwhelm existing neighborhood social controls. Using longitudinal data comprised of census data, municipal crime data, and a data set containing five years of sporting event attendance, this study examines the relationship between sporting events and neighborhood crime in a large city in the United States using geospatial analysis techniques. The results have implications for both social disorganization and routine activities theories of crime.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: For theoretical reasons, Event History Calendars (EHCs) are expected to encourage respondents to use idiosyncratic cues available in the structure of autobiographical memory, improving the quality of retrospective reports. In a direct experimental comparison between paper and pencil EHC (n = 309; 84.4 percent- response rate) and standardized question list (Q-list; n = 307; 84.1 percent- response rate) interviewing methodologies, the EHC has been shown to lead to higher quality survey retrospective reports for a reference period of one to two years previously on variables that measure the quantity and frequency of social and economic behaviors. In this experiment, interviews were conducted during 1998 on events that occurred during the calendar years of 1996 and 1997. Using data from the same respondents collected one year earlier on events reported during 1996 as a standard of comparison, the quality of retrospective reports on 1996 events from the 1998 administration of EHC and Q-list interviews was assessed. Specifically, the EHC outperformed the Q-list in eliciting reports of whether moved, number of jobs, amount of income, and the number of weeks not working due to unemployment, the illness of oneself, or the illness of another. However, data had yet to be analyzed to determine any advantages for EHC interviews in the retrospective reporting of when events happened. In analyses of the specific months during 1996 that respondents reported having been employed, unemployed, and out of the labor force, the EHC had significantly higher match rates of specific months for employment and out of the labor force than the Q-list. In addition, the EHC and Q-list did not differ in intrusion rates of specific months with any of these variables. Taken together, the hit and intrusion rates indicate that the EHC condition led to better reporting of when events happened in comparison to the Q-list.

Publication Type: Extended Abstract
Abstract: According to Zwaan & Radvansky (1998) readers construct situational representations of the events in a narrative, in which each event can be indexed on one of five dimensions - time, space, causation, motivation and protagonist. We examine the relatively understudied relationship between fantasy and reality narratives, focusing on the time dimension and its role in the construction of situational representations. Undergraduate participants read stories in which the characters and their actions were either consistent with reality, i.e., a wolf attacking a chicken, or where they were inconsistent with reality, and therefore fantastical, i.e., a book attacking a pencil. The fantasy and reality narratives had parallel plots, matched for word frequency, verb type, verb valence and word count. Participants read either a fantasy narrative then a reality narrative or the reverse. The experiments assessed participants' judgments of similarity, duration and event structure for the two narrative types. The judged duration of the second narrative was shorter than the first narrative irrespective of which narrative type was first, (consistent with the contextual change hypothesis for duration estimates, Block 1985). This difference was moderated by which narrative was read first. Participants estimated that the second narrative was shorter by 3.5% when the fantasy narrative was read first or 14% shorter when the reality narrative was read first. This finding suggests that people use real events to ground their comprehension of fantasy narratives.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: We hear, ad nauseum, that 9/11 changed everything. We grow old. Issues change or go away. Policies shift. Governments change. Situations get better or worse. Peace breaks out or violence escalates. Events change things -- why else would we study them? The question to be examined here is -- Do these, or some of these, events significantly change the nature of the events themselves? -- Thereby negating the applicability of previous scholarship and foreign policy experience. Over 20 years ago, I began a series of investigations into the nature of anti-foreign demonstrations, I was able create a paradigm which distinguished among these events on two dimensions with over 80 significant (p<0.00005) findings. These earlier studies were based upon a rather detailed data set limited to Asia. Asia was chosen for the data population because of the region's broad range of political, economic and cultural values. This study proposes to test the earlier findings two ways. The first is to trace the progress of the actors and the issues that were identified in the earlier studies in an effort to note significant changes at several levels and to determine how well the earlier findings travel. Second, this study will present a less detailed but broader (world-wide) and updated data set with which we will be able to test the paradigm on the post Cold War (and post 9/11) world stage. The range of possible findings is rather broad. On one hand, the earlier model may remain valid. On the other hand, I may just have to accept the idea that the earlier studies, no matter how strong the findings, are just works of late 20th Century history. Between these extremes the study may identify which could strengthen earlier findings, give direction to future studies and provide insight into subnational conflict.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Much of the literature in international relations theory relies on historical narrative to support a particular theoretical position. For such a strategy to be effective, these historical narratives must be presented as coherent, meaningful, and relevant for the theoretical purposes the author specifies. This paper proposes to read historical narrative in international relations theory through the work of Jacques Derrida, and his concept of the ?event.? In particular, we examine how historical events become meaningful when articulated in the service of particular subjectivities, and how, as events of import, their elevated status affects the marginalization of other events, people, and subjectivities. The point here is greater than the observation that ?The winners write the history books.? What is at stake in the writing of historical events, we argue, is the production, reproduction, and limitation of particular kinds of thought about the possibilities of continuity and change in international political life. Specifically, in this paper, we look at the example of how the codification of World War I works to erase the role of anarchist thought in the political history of early 20th century Europe in order to support a statist conceptualization of the causes of large-scale war. We consider how of the role of anarchism is written (or written out) in: a) early coverage of WWI; b) contemporary IR analyses of WWI, and; c) Joseph Conrad?s The Secret Agent, in order to explain how ?the event? both creates and marginalizes political subjects, as well as to explore how else these historical subjectivities could be written.