Clifford Robe Shaw

Clifford Robe Shaw (1895 to 1957) was an American sociologist and criminologist, a major figure of the Chicago School of sociology in the 1930s and 1940s and one of the most influential figures in American criminology. With Henry D. McKay he studied juvenile delinquency in the late 1920s, and their work did much to move the study of delinquency toward sociology and away from psychology and psychiatry. Their research ran along three lines: the geographic variation of delinquency rates across the city, the collection and study of delinquents' own autobiographical accounts, and the Chicago Area Project, a community delinquency prevention program tied to Shaw's social disorganization theory. The two studies Shaw and McKay published in the 1930s and 1940s were still held in high regard among social scientists in the 1970s. The English Wikipedia article on him is short, so this entry states only what that article supports.