Speaker: George Wood

Department of Sociology, Yale University

 

Talk summary: Field-interventions are now a key tool in the policy response to gunshot violence. Despite evidence that field-interventions reduce aggregate levels of gunshot violence, there is little research addressing how interventions produce such reductions. In this talk, I will present the results of a network-based evaluation on a large-scale gunshot violence reduction program in Chicago. Instead of analyzing pre- and post-trends in gunshot victimization, we follow victimization outcomes for intervention participants and their non-participating peers. We estimate the direct effects of the intervention on participants, as well as intervention spillover effects on non-participating peers. For this work, we developed a modeling approach that attempts to address the empirical challenges of estimating treatment and spillover effects in the context of interference between units. This talk will focus on these challenges, especially outcome contagion, outcome-dependent clustering, and treatment spillover. The results of our evaluation have implications for the design and implementation of future field-interventions aimed at reducing gunshot violence, particularly regarding the influence of social networks on intervention efficacy.

 

Bio: George Wood is Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Internal Medicine at Yale University. He received his PhD from the University of Oxford. His research interests include gunshot violence, police misconduct, networks, field-interventions in the context of dependent data, and estimation on large-scale graphs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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