The University of Southern Mississippi The Aquila Digital Community Dissertations Summer 8-2013 An Examination of Cities' Resilence to Violent Crime: A Contextual Analysis of Victim-Offender Convergence Vanessa Hatch Woodward University of Southern Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations Part of the Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons, Legal Writing and Research Commons, and the Other Legal Studies Commons Recommended Citation Woodward, Vanessa Hatch, "An Examination of Cities' Resilence to Violent Crime: A Contextual Analysis of Victim-Offender Convergence" (2013). Dissertations. 210. https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations/210 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by The Aquila Digital Community. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of The Aquila Digital Community. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The University of Southern Mississippi AN EXAMINATION OF CITIES’ RESILIENCE TO VIOLENT CRIME: A CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF VICTIM-OFFENDER CONVERGENCE by Vanessa Hatch Woodward Abstract of a Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of The University of Southern Mississippi in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2013 ABSTRACT AN EXAMINATION OF CITIES’ RESILIENCE TO VIOLENT CRIME: A CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF VICTIM-OFFENDER CONVERGENCE by Vanessa Hatch Woodward August 2013 In his 2012 Presidential Address to the American Society of Criminology, Robert Sampson purported that causality can only be reached when social science researchers accept that individual actions are dependent on social context. He referred to this as contextual causality and argued that future research needed to focus on how to measure and/or reoperationalize community measures of crime.