Exposure to gun violence is one of the great traumas of American life, but its harms are not equally distributed. In a first-of-its-kind study published Tuesday in JAMA Network Open, a Harvard sociology professor and his colleagues set out to examine exposure to shootings by race, sex, and birth year in a long-term study that followed respondents from childhood up to age 40.
“The idea here is to take a life-course perspective,” said Robert J. Sampson, the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor. “When is exposure to gun violence happening? How does that change over the life course? And how do those patterns vary by race, sex, and all the societal changes that are happening?”
These questions were tackled by analyzing longitudinal data on a representative sample of 2,418 participants from Chicago — half male and half female — who were born in 1981, 1984, 1987, and 1996. Four rounds of data were collected for up to 25 years. All in all, responses underscore the profound tolls on Black and Hispanic communities while surfacing new insights related to gender and birth year.