DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

Area(s) of Interest

Community safety, race and racism, violence, urban social change, mixed methods research design

Current Research

The central motivation for all of my research projects is a desire to understand both how violence and harm come to be and how to equitably create safe communities given the vast racial disparities in victimization and incarceration. I explore these issues through four related areas of research: the social origins of crime, the meaning of safety, attempts to reform or transform community safety policy, and responses to violence. In the wake of the George Floyd uprisings, my mixed methods dissertation investigated where the country stood on debates over racial equity and public safety using novel survey data and an ethnography of one Southern city’s efforts to transform their community safety system. In addition to my dissertation research, I published an article in the Journal of Social Problems on how Du Bois’s social disharmony and racial injustice theory not only anticipated the turn from biological to social explanations of crime but also offered a unique analysis of urban neighborhoods and racial hierarchies. I am also affiliated with the Northwestern Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research and Science (CORNERS), where I helped facilitate evaluations of community violence interventions in Chicago via collaborative community partnerships. Across my work, I use qualitative and quantitative methods. Trained in mixed methods, I view combining qualitative and quantitative modes of data collection, analysis, or inference as a distinct skill set with its own markers of rigor. I am passionate about teaching research methodology, including introductory statistics and regression methods for the social sciences.

Selected Publications*

Werth, S.R. (2024). “Social Disharmony and Racial Injustice: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Theories on Crime.” Social Problems, 71(1): 18-35

Werth, S. Rose, Megan Comfort, Matthew Demichele, and Pamela K. Lattimore. 2020. “Authenticity, Coherence, and Power Shifts: A Framework for Assessing Community Engagement Across the Criminal Justice System.” The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice 59(4):400–422.

*See CV for full list.