Ronnie A. Dunn

What Is “Urban Studies”? Context, Internal Structure, and Content

ABSTRACT: The record of learned concern with cities is nearly as old as the city itself. In the past several decades, however, a distinct academic field of “Urban Studies” has emerged. This article characterizes the context, internal structure, and content of the field through interviews with leading scholars, probabilistic multidimensional scaling analyses of survey data, and a content analysis of a leading journal. The article concludes that although Urban Studies is in some respects not a bounded “academic discipline,” it is an intellectually coherent, distinctively structured, and promising field of inquiry steered by complex, ever-changing, and often-large-scale realities and real-world problems of evolving human settlements.

Measuring Racial Disparities in Traffic Ticketing Within Large Urban Jurisdictions

As racial profiling has emerged as one of the most contentious and persistent issues confronting law enforcement and public officials across the nation in the last 20 years, research in this area has evolved rapidly. Although an increasing number of studies have been conducted on racial profiling in traffic enforcement, scholars have not reached a consensus on how best to estimate the driving population to compare with racial traffic ticketing data from a jurisdiction. This study combines traffic flow data for the city of Cleveland with residential census data to estimate the citys driving population. This provides a more precise estimate of the driving population than estimates obtained from traffic flow and census data used separately, as in earlier studies. This study finds that although blacks are a majority of city residents, they are not the majority of the driving population, yet are more likely to be ticketed than whites.

RESPONSE TO “THE HISTORY IN URBAN STUDIES: A COMMENT”

The purpose of our paper “What is Urban Studies?” was to provide a general empirical description of the field, from its origin to the present. We sought to approach this problem as systematically and impartially as possible. At no time did our goals include normative prescriptions of what the field should or should not contain. Our first step was to develop a set of categories for the large collection of scholarship that constitutes the field of urban studies. This was necessary to describe and analyze a huge body of literature. The benefits of this approach included identifying, elucidating, and facilitating discussion about differences among the categories of the constituent literature. We developed the category scheme by identifying prominent urban studies programs throughout the United States and then carefully examining the textbooks used in those programs. The process we employed was essentially an interactive one of tentatively stipulating categories, carefully culling the texts, and saying to ourselves “This one is like that one, and both are different from those others.” We continually adapted and altered the categories in order to accommodate the information encountered in the collection of texts until we were satisfied that a maximally comprehensive category scheme was constructed. Of course, the process of developing categories always has a drawback: it inevitably leads to a loss of information, indeed sometimes vital information that indicates shades of difference. Therefore, before proceeding to estimate the internal structure of the categories or apply it in a content analysis, we rigorously tested that the categories were exhaustive, exclusive, and as valid as possible. We did this through numerous structured interviews with pioneers in the field and other colleagues, during which we specifically asked whether the seven-category scheme was reasonable and complete. The great bulk of the responses we received were wholly supportive of the scheme. Moreover, only when we were satisfied with the congruence of our scheme did we attempt to further clarify the description of the field through our chosen methodologies.

Increasing Cultural Competency Among Medical Care Providers

This chapter describes a video-based approach to assisting physicians and other health workers to become culturally competent in prevention/intervention work with low-income African Americans. This approach is based on the successful Urban Cancer Project, a National Cancer Institute funded collaboration between social scientists, a comprehensive cancer center, and a video-production company (see, Marks et al., 2004).