Nicolo P. Pinchak

My research examines how features of communities shape individual- and community-level well-being, such as how school resources shape adolescent and neighborhood crime rates, and how routine activity patterns shape individuals' risk of experiencing discrimination. I am especially interested in making sense of why more resourced communities—such as low-poverty neighborhoods and high-cohesion schools—do not reliably yield their anticipated benefits for community members.

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My first major line of research investigates whether and how features of school contexts shape adolescents' behavioral trajectories. My dissertation examined how the extent of cohesion in youths' schools  shapes their delinquency and violence perpetration. One important conclusion from this work is that efforts to curb problem behavior by fostering cohesion among students can be undermined by youth network processes. This insight led me to join the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN+), which enables unprecedented investigation of how social capital dynamics among teachers and parents in schools shape adolescent behavior and development. Other studies to come from this line of work have examined how neighborhood and school contexts interact to shape adolescent violence (in Journal of Youth and Adolescence) and the protective health effects of HBCU attendance among Black college-goers (in American Journal of Epidemiology). 

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My second major line of research focuses on how routine activity patterns contribute to individual- and community-level well-being. For example, some of my work has investigated how routine monitoring among neighborhood residents can deter crime (in Social Forces); the extent of racial inequalities in activity space (e.g., exposure to violence, collective efficacy, and segregation; in Demography and American Journal of Sociology); measurement of residents' neighborhoods, activity spaces, and residential segregation (in Urban Studies); the contribution of geographic mobility patterns to crime (in Annual Review of Criminology); and how the same environment can have drastically different consequences for individuals depending on their race (in Annual Review of Sociology).

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I received my B.A. in sociology from Bowling Green State University, where I worked as a research assistant in the Center for Family & Demographic Research. There I also received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to pursue graduate studies at Ohio State University, where I completed a Ph.D. in sociology.