Gregory M Zimmerman

• PhD
• Northeastern University

Objectives. To examine the independent and joint effects of state legislation on minimum age for purchasing handguns and background checks on the suicide of young adults aged 18 to 20 years. Methods. We used negative binomial regressions with fixed effects for year and generalized estimating equations for state to estimate the effects of state legi...

Research highlights racial and ethnic disparities in suicide, but Asian American suicide receives very little attention in the literature. This is the first comprehensive, large-scale, nationally representative study of completed suicide among Asian Americans in the United States. Descriptive and multilevel regression techniques compared the risk f...

Past research has linked peer and teacher discrimination to risk factors for school discipline, but few studies have examined whether peer and teacher discrimination have a direct impact on school discipline. This study examines the effects of general peer and teacher discrimination at the individual‐ and school‐level on school suspension using nat...

Research indicates that the burden of violent death in the United States is disproportionate across racial and ethnic groups. Yet documented disparities in rates of violent death do not capture the full extent of this inequity. Recent studies examining race-specific rates of potential years of life lost—a summary measure of premature mortality—indi...

Suicide rates vary across occupational groups, with protective service occupations at elevated risk for suicide. Yet, research on correctional officer suicide remains sparse, as does research linking the broader social context to police officer suicides and correctional officer suicides. This study examines differences in the individual and context...

This study examines the salience of social context for opioid overdoses in Boston from 2014 to 2019. Longitudinal negative binomial models with random effects indicated that higher levels of concentrated disadvantage, residential instability, and illicit drug activity increased annual block group counts of opioid overdoses. Logistic hierarchical an...

Objectives: Bridge the gap between feminist scholarship and sociological literature on gun utility by examining the correlates of gun usage in heterosexual intimate partner homicide by offender gender. Methods: Using data on 7,588 incidents from the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) from 2003 to 2018, logistic regression models examin...

Despite a wealth of research on intimate partner homicide, research on intimate partner homicide followed by suicide of the perpetrator is sparse. Existing studies on intimate partner homicide-suicide: tend to be descriptive, not keeping pace with quantitative advances in the epidemiological and social sciences; have yet to examine how context impa...

A growing body of research links interpersonal racial and ethnic discrimination to adverse youth outcomes. Yet, studies examining the relevance of neighborhood context for discrimination are sparse. This study examines neighborhood-level variation in the incidence and impact of perceived racial and ethnic discrimination on depressive symptoms, suic...

Body-worn cameras have proliferated in law enforcement agencies over the past decade. Yet, studies examining the relevance of place for body-worn camera adoption are sparse. This study investigated the spatial distribution and contextual correlates of body-worn cameras in the USA. Using data from the 2016, Law Enforcement Management and Administrat...

There is a growing body of research linking racial and ethnic discrimination to adverse youth outcomes. Beyond experienced racial and ethnic discrimination, this study considers the relevance of anticipated and vicarious racial and ethnic discrimination for depression and suicidal behavior. Hierarchical regression models on a diverse sample of 1147...

Police use of deadly force represents a pressing public policy issue with implications for police-community relationships and equitable access to justice. A growing body of literature considering the structural factors influencing officers’ exposure to potential violence suggests that context plays a pivotal role in officer use of deadly force. Thi...

Objectives To test the cumulative disadvantage hypothesis—that system-level racial and ethnic disparities accumulate from intake to final disposition—by investigating relative and absolute disparities across different pathways through the juvenile justice system. Methods Using a sample of 95,670 juvenile court referrals across 140 counties in four...

Objectives Compared to homicide-only, homicide-suicide is understudied in the criminological literature. This study investigates the victim-offender relationship—one of the most well-established correlates of homicide-suicide—from a new angle. In addition to examining the familiarity/closeness of the victim-offender relationship, this study investi...

Objectives Existing research on the effects of body-worn cameras (BWCs) have found largely consistent results regarding direct significant reductions in citizen complaints and often also report reductions in use of force reports. However, few studies have examined possible spillover effects onto untreated officers. This study explicitly tests for d...

Objectives Use of lethal force by police officers has incited riots, inspired social movements, and engendered socio-political debate. Police officers also assume a high level of risk during police–citizen encounters. Yet, existing studies tend to center on these two phenomena independently. Additionally, the under-utilization of multilevel researc...

Research has linked various constructs with a shared focus on the future to suicidal behavior. This study examined: (1) whether life expectancy and expectations for future health were associated with reduced odds of suicidal ideation and attempted suicide, and (2) whether the reducing effect of having high levels of future expectations on suicidal...

Literature has documented racial and ethnic disparities in resident fatalities by the police and police fatalities by residents. Yet, there has been a lack of research on police-resident relationships within Hispanic communities. Additionally, research has rarely considered the relevance of social context for fatal police-resident encounters or exa...

Objectives Examine the relationships among structural disadvantage, friendship network age composition, and violent offending by investigating the contextual and individual etiology of affiliating with older friends and exploring the mechanisms that link friendship network age composition to violent offending. Method Hierarchical linear models ana...

Objectives To investigate the relationship between criminal offending and mortality over the full life-course of treatment group participants in the Cambridge–Somerville Youth Study (CSYS). Methods The CSYS is a delinquency prevention experiment and prospective longitudinal survey of the development of offending. Begun in 1939, the study involves...

Purpose Despite the rich history of empirical research on neighborhood collective efficacy, studies considering the factors that contribute to collective efficacy formation at the individual level have yet to account for family members’ perceptions of collective efficacy. This study examines whether individuals form perceptions of neighborhood coll...

There is virtually no information on the relevance of contextual gun availability for homicide-suicide, or on whether ecological gun availability distinguishes homicide-suicide from homicide-only and suicide-only. This study addresses these gaps in the literature. Data from the National Violent Death Reporting System includes 2,535 homicide-suicide...

Objectives To examine the extent to which adults’ and youths’ perceptions of collective efficacy align, the shared and unique correlates of adults’ and youths’ perceptions, and the effects of adults’ and youths’ perceptions on youths’ violence. Method Descriptive analysis, hierarchical linear modeling, and spatial analysis analyze 1,636 youths fro...

Importance: Mortality is an important outcome in evaluating crime prevention programs, but little is known about the effects on mortality during the full life course. Objective: To determine the long-term outcomes of a crime prevention program on mortality and whether the iatrogenic effects on mortality observed in middle age persist or change i...

Homicide followed by suicide remains an understudied phenomenon in the criminological literature. This is due, in part, to methodological and statistical limitations—much of the extant research includes small samples and has not kept pace with quantitative advances. Moreover, scholarship on homicide–suicide has been focused almost exclusively on in...

Objectives To examine the contemporaneous (cross-sectional), acute (1 year), enduring (5–7 years), and long-term (12–13 years) effects of exposure to violence on offending behaviors. Methods We analyze four waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health ( N = 7,706). Exposure to violence captures direct (interpers...

Background Criminological research utilizes several types of delinquency scales, including frequency counts and, increasingly, variety scores. The latter counts the number of distinct types of crimes an individual has committed. Often, variety scores are modeled via count regression techniques (e.g., Poisson, negative binomial), which are best suit...

Although suicide and homicide are two of the leading causes of death, theoretical understanding and rigorous quantitative examination of homicide-suicide - the rare combination of suicide and homicide - are sparse. We ground homicide-suicide in the stream analogy of lethal violence and use three analytical techniques to examine the shared and uniqu...

Objective: This study explored the extent to which depression, somatic symptoms, and substance use mediated the effects of exposure to violence on suicidal ideation and attempted suicide, and whether these pathways varied across gender, age, and race/ethnicity. Methods: Path analysis on 12,272 adolescents (mean = 15.3 years) from the National Lo...

Purpose The relationship between exposure to violence and adverse behavioral outcomes is well-documented. But, heterogeneity in this relationship across different operational strategies for exposure to violence is less well understood. This study examines the effects of repeat victimization, exposure to different types of violence, and poly-victimi...

The relationship between secondary exposure to violence-defined as witnessing violence in the home, community, or school-and adolescent substance use is well-documented. Yet, multi-wave empirical studies examining this relationship are sparse. In addition, studies have only begun to examine whether this relationship varies by the situational compon...

Founded in 1939, the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study represents the earliest longitudinal–experimental study in developmental crime prevention, combining the aims of understanding how the developmental process is related to future offending (i.e., longitudinal focus) as well as attempting to prevent offending through an experimental intervention d...

Theory matters in crime prevention. Indeed, but this is hardly the full story. Crime prevention is oftentimes viewed as atheoretical—not grounded in the etiology of crime and offending. Reasons abound for this view, and the recent interest in an evidence-based approach to policy-making has been at the forefront. This article reviews the role that t...

Recent research has affirmed the need to examine contextual influences on adolescent substance use in a multilevel framework. This study examined the role of neighborhood opportunities for substance use in promoting adolescent substance use. Data came from two components of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods: the Longitudinal...

Research suggests that street efficacy-the perceived ability to avoid dangerous situations in one's neighborhood-is related to violent outcomes. We investigated change in street efficacy using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. Measures of street efficacy and violence (offending, victimization, secondary exposure)...

Purpose Research has demonstrated that adolescents with higher levels of street efficacy – the perceived ability to avoid violence and to stay safe in the neighborhood – are less likely to engage in violence themselves. But, empirical research has yet to examine sex differences in the relationship between street efficacy and violent offending. This...

Adolescents overestimate their risk for early or premature death. In turn, perceived early fatality is associated with a host of adverse developmental outcomes. Research on the correlates of perceived early fatality is nascent, and an examination of the contextual determinants of perceived early fatality is largely absent from the literature. Using...

Research suggests that direct exposure (personal victimization) and indirect exposure (witnessing or hearing about the victimization of a family member, friend, or neighbor) to violence are correlated. However, questions remain about the co-occurrence of these phenomena within individuals. We used data on 1915 youths (with an average age of 12 year...

Criminology has paid increasing attention to the prospect that prevention programmes can cause harm. The Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study, a delinquency prevention experiment of 506 boys that began in 1939, provides some of the earliest evidence of programmatic iatrogenic effects. A series of hypotheses were advanced by Joan McCord and other schola...

Although a wealth of research has substantiated the relationship between self-control and offending independent of an array of theoretically relevant covariates, little is known about the contextual variability of this relationship. Our study contributes to the literature by assessing neighborhood variability in the explanatory effect of self-contr...

Objectives Neighborhood youth organizations are a salient community-level resource in the lives of children and adolescents, but empirical research on the aggregate-level rela-tionship between neighborhood crime rates and neighborhood organizations is mixed. This study attempts to clarify and extend prior research by examining (1) whether there is...

Purpose: Research suggests that interpersonal violence and suicidal behavior often co-occur and share a common set of risk factors. This study examined (1) the extent to which individuals specialize in interpersonal violence or suicidal behavior and (2) the shared and unique covariates of individual specialization. Methods: The Project on Human...

The correlation between victimization and offending (i.e., the victim–offender overlap) is one of the most documented empirical findings in delinquency research, leading researchers to investigate potential contingencies in this relationship. A small number of studies have found evidence of contextual variation in the victim–offender overlap, but t...

Criminologists have long recognized the importance of peers in the etiology of delinquency. Yet, the bulk of empirical studies on this topic make the implicit assumption that the peer effect to be conditioned is linear. With few notable exceptions, prior criminological research has not thought deeply about possible nonlinearity in the peer effect....

Purpose Much of the research on peer influence has examined the relationship between peer associations and delinquency. Relatively little empirical research has addressed the effects of delinquent behavior on peer intimacy and time spent with peers. Our research attempts to fill these gaps in the literature as we hypothesize that, net of peer delin...

Purpose Empirical research has yet to demonstrate that strict school disciplinary policies deter student misconduct. However, underlying the null and negative effects observed in prior research may be competing social impacts. What is missing from prior research is an acknowledgement that the deviance amplification effects of criminogenic risk fact...

Survey data for studying youth's secondary exposure to community violence (i.e., witnessing or hearing violence in the community) come from both parents and their children. There are benefits of considering multiple informants in psychosocial assessments, but parents and youths often disagree about comparable information. These reporting difference...

This article uses data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) to investigate the sex gap in violent crime. We posit that the sex gap decreases at higher levels of exposure to violent peers, and we test two competing explanations for this possibility. The first hypothesis, based on previous research using the PHDCN, s...

Secondary exposure to community violence, defined as witnessing or hearing violence in the community, has the potential to profoundly impact long-term development, health, happiness, and security. While research has explored pathways to community violence exposure at the individual, family, and neighborhood levels, prior work has largely neglected...

Many studies have documented an increasing prevalence of secondary exposure to community violence from childhood through young adulthood. Yet inconsistencies exist in the findings, with some studies reporting a weak association, or no association, between age and exposure to community violence. This study investigates whether the disparate study fi...

Secondary exposure to community violence is particularly detrimental for male youths, who disproportionately report witnessing community violence and suffering associated trauma-related symptoms. Yet, few studies have investigated whether parents perceive and report similar gender disparities among youths. In addition, few studies have examined the...

Although interpersonal violence and suicide are two of the leading causes of death among young Americans, analyses focusing simultaneously on violence and suicide in sociological inquiry are sparse. Analyses also tend to be limited by their focus on either the individual-level predictors of suicidal behaviors or the aggregate-level predictors of su...

Gottfredson and Hirschi's self-control theory is one of the most empirically tested explanations of criminal behavior. Yet questions remain about the operationalization of self-control. Researchers have examined the relationship between self-control and crime predominantly with the Grasmick et al. (199318. Grasmick , Harold G. , Charles R. Tittle...

We used data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods to examine the extent to which individual, family, and contextual factors account for the differential exposure to violence associated with race/ethnicity among youths. Logistic hierarchical item response models on 2344 individuals nested within 80 neighborhoods revealed th...

This chapter highlights research on neighborhood influences on crime and stresses the importance of multilevel research, at both the conceptual and methodological levels. It explains the current state of the macrosociological approach to the study of crime, discusses the integration of this perspective with individual-level explanations of crime, a...

This article discusses community-level influences on offending and crime. It shows how the general ecological model can help understand the spatial distributions of patterns of urban activity and unconventional behaviors including crime and delinquency. It then identifies the supporting causal explanations of neighborhood effects and studies the em...

Although evidence of the strong correlation between deviant behavior and exposure to deviant peers is overwhelming, researchers have yet to investigate whether a nonlinear functional form better captures this relationship than does a linear form. Researchers also have yet to examine the extent to which peer effects vary as a function of the neighbo...

In this paper we relate a particular type of decision making, thoughtfully reflective decision making (TRDM) in adolescence, to successful and unsuccessful life outcomes in young adulthood. Those who are thoughtfully reflective in their decision making are more likely to consider possible alternative routes to goal attainment, weigh the costs and b...

This study investigated differences in parent and child estimates of the child's exposure to violence. Using data (N = 1,517) from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, analyses related differences between parent and child reports of the child's exposure to violence to the child's psychosocial functioning. Most parents (66%) un...

Although researchers consistently demonstrate that females engage in less criminal behavior than males across the life course, research on the variability of the gender gap across contexts is sparse. To address this issue, we examine the gender gap in self-reported violent crime among adolescents across neighborhoods. Multilevel models using data f...

The traditional trait-based approach to the study of crime has been challenged for its failure to acknowledge differences in the social environments to which individuals are exposed. Similarly, community-level explanations of crime have been criticized for failing to take into account important individual differences between criminals and non-crimi...

Research on the formation of sanction risk perceptions has concentrated virtually exclusively on the bases of legal sanction perceptions. This article examines the correlates of extralegal risk perceptions. Theoretical arguments relate previous offending experiences to current perceptions of self-imposed (guilt) and socially imposed (social disappr...