Cybelle Fox

Studying Rare Events Through Qualitative Case Studies: Lessons from a Study of Rampage School Shootings

This article considers five methodological challenges in studying rare events such as school shootings. Drawing on the literature on causal analysis in macro-historical and other small-N research, it outlines strategies for studying school shootings using qualitative case studies and illustrates these strategies using data from case studies of two rampage school shootings: Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky, and Westside Middle School outside Jonesboro, Arkansas. Strengths and limitations are discussed as well as lessons for studying rare events.

Race, Racism, and Discrimination: Bridging Problems, Methods, and Theory in Social Psychological Research

Scholars spanning the social sciences and humanities wrestle with the complex and often contested meanings of race, racism, and discrimination. In all of this enterprise, sociologists rightly retain a special claim to illuminating processes of group boundary maintenance, systems of racial inequality and supporting ideologies, and attendant patterns of intergroup behavior (Jackman 1994; Lamont 2000). Mainstream sociological research, however, has focused principally on the structural manifestations of race, racism, and discrimination, particularly as they characterize black-white relations (Wilson 1978). Sociologists have made signal contributions to the understanding of modern ghetto joblessness and poverty (Wilson 1996), of racial residential segregation (Massey and Denton 1993), and of fundamental disparities in accumulated wealth (Oliver and Shapiro 1995). In some critical respects this work has expanded to include multiracial and multiethnic comparisons with respect to both key economic (Lichter and Oliver 2000; Smith 2001; Waldinger 1996) and residential outcomes (Charles 2001; Emerson, Yancey, and Chai 2001). To a surprising degree, however, the micro social processes necessarily embedded in these structural analyses are still largely unaddressed. Yet the basic social processes invoked by the terms race, racism, and discrimination are quintessentially social psychological phenomena; sociologists ignore or downplay this basic insight at the disciplines peril. These concepts concern the meanings of social groupings and how those meanings come to guide patterns of relations among individuals recognized as members of particular groups. They immediately entail the labeling and social learning of group categories, identity, feelings, beliefs, and related cognitive structures. These factors, in turn, are expressed in lines of interaction and behavior that flow from, reinforce and reconstitute, or come to transform those social categorizations. In addition, such categorizations have direct implications for the structure and basic conditions of social organization. That is, race,1 racism,2 and discrimination3 are also, and perhaps most fundamentally, bases and mechanisms of hierarchical differentiation that shape the ordering of social relations as well as the allocation of life experiences and life chances (Zuberi 2001a).

Repeat Tragedy Rampage Shootings in American High School and College Settings, 2002-2008

The authors examine rampage shootings in American high schools after 2002 and consider whether factors identified in their prior research on rampages from 1974 to 2002 account for the more recent cases. The authors find that the five factors—social marginality, individual predisposing factors, cultural scripts, failure of the surveillance system, and availability of guns—remain important features. The authors then contrast these high school shootings with the recent spate of college rampage shootings that resemble the high school cases in some ways but differ in others. College shooters are older and therefore typically further along in the development of serious mental illness.

School Shootings as Organizational Deviance.

This article argues that rampage school shootings in American public schools can be understood as instances of organizational deviance, which occurs when events created by or in organizations do not conform to an organizations goals or expectations and produce unanticipated and harmful outcomes. Drawing on data from qualitative case studies of two schools that experienced shootings, the authors show how the organizational structure, environment, and culture of these schools led to the loss of information about socially or emotionally troubled students, information that might otherwise have led to some form of intervention or help for these students. Implications for educational policy and practice are discussed.

Defining America’s Racial Boundaries: Blacks, Mexicans, and European Immigrants, 1890–19451

Contemporary race and immigration scholars often rely on historical analogies to help them analyze America’s current and future color lines. If European immigrants became white, they claim, perhaps today’s immigrants can as well. But too often these scholars ignore ongoing debates in the historical literature about America’s past racial boundaries. Meanwhile, the historical literature is itself needlessly muddled. In order to address these problems, the authors borrow concepts from the social science literature on boundaries to systematically compare the experiences of blacks, Mexicans, and southern and eastern Europeans (SEEs) in the first half of the 20th century. Their findings challenge whiteness historiography; caution against making broad claims about the reinvention, blurring, or shifting of America’s color lines; and suggest that the Mexican story might have more to teach us about these current and future lines than the SEE one.

A Snapshot of Family Homelessness Across America

Homelessness remains one of the most misunderstood and least documented social policy issues of our time. For almost two decades, the majority of efforts to understand the issues surrounding homelessness have focused solely on transient men. Yet over the last fifteen years, the country has seen the rise of a new poverty: homeless families. Each year since 1993, the U.S. Conference of Mayors has reported that this group comprises the fastest growing segment of the homeless population.1 Today there are 400,000 homeless families in shelter, representing 1.1 million homeless children across America.2 Many Americans refuse to believe, however, that entire families are homeless in the richest country of the world. This collective denial has had grave consequences for homeless children and their families. The lack of hard data has not only obscured the complex nature of family homelessness, it has led to a crisis of policy in the dark. Policy prescriptions that are politically expedient have dominated public discourse. However, these policies are long on rhetoric and short on a reasoned appreciation for the myriad factors that contribute to and sustain family homelessness. In response to this gap between research and public policy, this study was designed to take a national snapshot of family homelessness: to describe the typical homeless family; to identify common trends in income, housing, educational and employment histories of homeless families across regions; and to es-

Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and Public and Private Social Welfare Spending in American Cities, 19291

Using a data set of public and private relief spending for 295 cities, this article examines the racial and ethnic patterning of social welfare provision in the United States in 1929. On the eve of the Depression, cities with more blacks or Mexicans spent the least on social assistance and relied more heavily on private money to fund their programs. Cities with more European immigrants spent the most on relief and relied more heavily on public funding. Distinct political systems, labor market relations, and racial ideologies about each group’s proclivity to use relief best explain relief spending differences across cities.

What counts as racist immigration policy

Culling the Masses is a rich, methodologically ambitious book, which sheds much needed light on the factors that influence the adoption and repeal of racist immigration policies across the Americas. Contrary to previous accounts that suggest that the end of racial selection in immigration policy began as a domestic issue in the United States and Australia and then spread elsewhere, FitzGerald and Cook-Martín “find that geopolitical factors were the main drivers of the demise of racial selection.” The sustained attention to the international forces that shape domestic immigration policy—and the means through which they do so—is an invaluable contribution of this excellent book. Culling the Masses also demonstrates that democracy and racist immigration laws not only co-existed comfortably with each other, they have also been causally connected. Somewhat less convincing, however, is the assertion that liberal democracies essentially abandoned racist immigration laws at the end of the 1960s.

BEYOND BLACK AND WHITE: Racial Conflict in the New Multi-ethnic City

Claire Jean Kim , Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, 300 pages, ISBN 0-300-07406-9,

The Changing Color of Welfare? How Whites’ Attitudes toward Latinos Influence Support for Welfare1

45.00. Jennifer Lee , Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002, 270 pages, ISBN 0-674-00897-9,