“Tolerance in the City: The Multilevel Effects of Urban Environments on Permissive Attitudes.” Volume 37, Issue 3, August 2015
Award Recipients
Jeffrey Debies-Carl (University of New Haven) and Christopher Huggins (University of Kentucky)
Committee Assessment
The committee recommends that Christopher Huggins and Jeffrey Debies-Carl receive an Honorable Mention for their article, “Tolerance in the City: The Multilevel Effects of Urban Environments on Permissive Attitudes.” The authors offer an innovative contribution to the study of political and social tolerance by empirically separating two distinct concepts — “tolerance of difference” and “tolerance of threat” — in an innovative way, and testing the determinants of these two sets of attitudes using data from the World Values Survey. The article showed a great deal of methodological sophistication and tackled a substantively important topic.
Award Committee
Chair: Vladimir Kogan, Ohio State University
Members: Shoshana Goldberg-Miller, Ohio State University; Renia Ehrenfeucht, University of New Mexico; Mathew Anderson, Eastern Washington University; Don Rosdil, Independent Scholar
Award Winners Bios
Christopher Huggins received his Phd from Ohio State University in 2009. He is currently researching the contextual influences on recidivism, including neighborhood characteristics like poverty and residential instability, as well as county characteristics like employment opportunity. In addition, he is investigating the causes and consequences of released offender mobility on the reintegration process. His other research has investigated the social psychological effects of different types of urbanism, including arguing for urbanism’s influence at the societal rather than the local level. He hopes to start a new project on Crime Prevention through Environmental Design, to test the preventative, deterrent, and social psychological effects of the built environment on criminal offending.
Jeffry Debies-Carl earned his doctoral and master’s degrees from the Ohio State University and his bachelor’s degree from Kent State University. He is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Psychology at the University of New Haven where he teaches a range of traditional courses – such as social psychology, cultural anthropology, and urban sociology – as well as more experimental classes in subjects ranging from fan cultures to games and simulations. His research examines the intersection of culture, society, and physical space, with a guiding interest in investigating how natural and built environments influence feelings, thoughts, behaviors, social organization, and culture, as well as how these in turn shape the built environment itself. His work has appeared in a range of scholarly journals such as the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Social Psychology Quarterly, and the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. He is the author of Punk Rock and the Politics of Space (Routledge, 2014).
