About

Corina Graif is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology, Research Associate at the Population Research Institute, and Graduate Faculty in Social Data Analytics at Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on communities and crime, with particular attention to mobility, neighborhood effects on children and youth, and the spatial stratification of violence, health risk, and opportunity. Dr. Graif’s work explores the consequences of urban poverty and population diversity on crime and health, emphasizing the role of social capital and the spatial distribution of social factors in multi-ethnic and multi-racial urban contexts. She integrates sociological and criminological perspectives, employing macro and micro-level approaches, experimental and counterfactual techniques, and combining spatial (GIS) and network analyses with computational big data analytics to understand causal links and inequalities in urban environments. Dr. Graif's current projects investigate the mechanisms underlying neighborhood effects on youth exposure to risky behaviors and violence, considering factors such as immigration, legal status, non-cognitive skills, and institutional networks. She also studies how individuals, opportunities, and criminogenic risks move across geographic space and transportation channels, impacting neighborhood social capital and inequalities related to poverty, health, and violence. Her research utilizes natural experiments like Hurricane Katrina and the Great Recession, along with data from sources such as Census, ACS, Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics, and the Moving to Opportunity experiment. Her work has been supported by funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Geography
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Social psychology
• Medicine
• Psychology
• Demography
• Statistics
• Demographic economics
• Environmental health
• Economic geography
• Economics
• Family medicine
• Econometrics
• Nursing
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Arrests and the Opioid Epidemic: An Investigation into the Spatial and Social Network Spillover of Opioid Overdoses in Chicago

  Journal of Quantitative Criminology · 2025-05-31

  articleOpen access

  Objectives: This study investigates the role of criminal justice intervention practices, i.e., opioid arrests, in effectively preventing or increasing opioid overdoses, paying particular attention to whether arrests in spatially proximate or socially connected communities lead to the displacement or prevention of opioid overdoses in a local community. Methods: Combining data from the Cook County medical examiner, emergency medical services information, arrest reports, and commuting network statistics for Chicago's 77 community areas between 2016 and 2019, this study uses fixed effects spatial autoregressive models with spatial lags to explain community-level opioid overdose rates. Results: We find evidence for the diffusion and displacement of overdose risk as well as the diffusion of overdose-reducing benefits. Findings suggest complex spatial and social spillover mechanisms that both diffuse and prevent opioid overdoses, dependent on the type of opioid-related crime and overdose rate investigated. Conclusions: These results have important implications for understanding the effectiveness of criminal justice policies in their goal of preventing opioid-related crime and overdoses and provide insights for designing more appropriate and effective policy responses to address substance use and illicit drug markets.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Community representation and policing: Effects on Black civilians

  CrimRxiv · 2024-09-07

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Does increased representation of Black individuals in the police force lead to less aggressive policing of Black individuals? The current study uses a Chicago panel data set with monthly police unit observations between 2013 and 2015 to understand 1) how police units’ representation of Black individuals affects the number of stops of Black residents and 2) how individual police officers patrol differently depending on the racial/ethnic background of co-working officers. Using fixed-effects negative binomial regression, we found that increasing racial congruence between police officers and the community being patrolled was associated over time with fewer stops of Black residents. Individual analyses showed that Black (vs. White) officers stopped fewer Black civilians, with larger effects in police units with higher percentages of Black officers, indicating a unit group effect. Furthermore, as the number of Black officer co-workers in a shift increased, Black civilian stops declined for all officers, including White officers, which is consistent with active representation. These findings indicate that a more diverse and representative police force can reduce aggressive policing of minority communities by mitigating group threat and cultivating positive cross-racial exchanges within police organizations and smaller peer groups.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Community representation and policing: Effects on Black civilians

  Criminology · 2024-08-01 · 15 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Does increased representation of Black individuals in the police force lead to less aggressive policing of Black individuals? The current study uses a Chicago panel data set with monthly police unit observations between 2013 and 2015 to understand 1) how police units' representation of Black individuals affects the number of stops of Black residents and 2) how individual police officers patrol differently depending on the racial/ethnic background of co-working officers. Using fixed-effects negative binomial regression, we found that increasing racial congruence between police officers and the community being patrolled was associated over time with fewer stops of Black residents. Individual analyses showed that Black (vs. White) officers stopped fewer Black civilians, with larger effects in police units with higher percentages of Black officers, indicating a unit group effect. Furthermore, as the number of Black officer co-workers in a shift increased, Black civilian stops declined for all officers, including White officers, which is consistent with active representation. These findings indicate that a more diverse and representative police force can reduce aggressive policing of minority communities by mitigating group threat and cultivating positive cross-racial exchanges within police organizations and smaller peer groups.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Role of Infant Health Problems in Constraining Interneighborhood Mobility: Implications for Citywide Employment Networks

  Journal of Health and Social Behavior · 2023-06-04 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Infant health problems are a persistent concern across the United States, disproportionally affecting socioeconomically vulnerable communities. We investigate how inequalities in infant health contribute to differences in interneighborhood commuting mobility and shape neighborhoods' embeddedness in the citywide structure of employment networks in Chicago over a 14-year period. We use the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics' Origin-Destination Employment Statistics to analyze commuting networks between 2002 and 2015. Results from longitudinal network analyses indicate two main patterns. First, after the Great Recession, a community's infant health problems began to significantly predict isolation from the citywide employment network. Second, pairwise dissimilarity in infant health problems predicts a lower likelihood of mobility ties between communities throughout the entire study period. The findings suggest that infant health problems present a fundamental barrier for communities in equally accessing the full range of jobs and opportunities across the city-compounding existing inequalities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Socially Connected Neighborhoods and the Spread of Sexually Transmitted Infections

  Demography · 2022-07-15 · 11 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the United States have been increasing at record levels and exhibit unequal spatial patterning across urban populations and neighborhoods. Research on the effects of residential and nearby neighborhoods on STI proliferation has largely ignored the role of socially connected contexts, even though neighborhoods are routinely linked by individuals' movements across space for work and other social activities. We showcase how commuting and public transit networks contribute to the social spillover of STIs in Chicago. Examining data on all employee-employer location links recorded yearly by the Census Bureau for more than a decade, we assess network spillover effects of local community STI rates on interconnected communities. Spatial and network autoregressive models show that exposure to STIs in geographically proximate and socially proximate communities contributes to increases in local STI levels, even net of socioeconomic and demographic factors and prior STIs. These findings suggest that geographically proximate and socially connected communities influence one another's infection rates through social spillover effects.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Connected in health: Place-to-place commuting networks and COVID-19 spillovers

  Health & Place · 2022 · 16 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Neighborhood Isolation in Chicago: Violent Crime Effects on Structural Isolation and Homophily in Inter-Neighborhood Commuting Networks, 2002-2013

  2021-07-05 · 6 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Creative Approaches for Assessing Long-term Outcomes in Children

  PEDIATRICS · 2021-07-01 · 4 citations

  reviewOpen access

  Advances in new technologies, when incorporated into routine health screening, have tremendous promise to benefit children. The number of health screening tests, many of which have been developed with machine learning or genomics, has exploded. To assess efficacy of health screening, ideally, randomized trials of screening in youth would be conducted; however, these can take years to conduct and may not be feasible. Thus, innovative methods to evaluate the long-term outcomes of screening are needed to help clinicians and policymakers make informed decisions. These methods include using longitudinal and linked-data systems to evaluate screening in clinical and community settings, school data, simulation modeling approaches, and methods that take advantage of data available in the digital and genomic age. Future research is needed to evaluate how longitudinal and linked-data systems drawing on community and clinical settings can enable robust evaluations of the effects of screening on changes in health status. Additionally, future studies are needed to benchmark participating individuals and communities against similar counterparts and to link big data with natural experiments related to variation in screening policies. These novel approaches have great potential for identifying and addressing differences in access to screening and effectiveness of screening across population groups and communities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An Ecological Model to Frame the Delivery of Pediatric Preventive Care

  PEDIATRICS · 2021 · 18 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Medicine
  • Nursing
  • Environmental health

  Screening and surveillance are integral aspects of child health promotion and disease prevention. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that primary care clinicians screen children and adolescents for a broad array of conditions, conduct surveillance of growth and development, identify social determinants of health, and identify protective and risk factors that might impact health over time. However, access to and outcomes of preventive services vary based on features of children’s social ecology, including family and community contexts. The proposed five-stage socio-ecological model considers multiple contextual dimensions of pediatric screening: (1) individual, (2) interpersonal, (3) organizational, (4) community/population, and (5) public policy. Incorporating this model into routine care might improve outcomes at the individual and population level. Future endeavors should focus on integration of this model with validated risk screening tools as part of a supportive electronic health record, culture, and incentive structure. Further research assessing the contributors and outcomes of differences in beliefs, resources, practices, and opportunities among individuals, families, providers, primary care organizations, communities, health systems, and policy partners will be essential in advancing knowledge and policies to improve preventive services delivery.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Modeling the Social and Spatial Proximity of Crime: Domestic and Sexual Violence Across Neighborhoods

  Journal of Quantitative Criminology · 2020 · 28 citations

  • Sociology
  • Geography
  • Econometrics
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Big Data and Network Analysis of Children's Health

  NIH · $692k · 2017–2023

Frequent coauthors

• Robert J. Sampson

  Harvard University

  4 shared

• Mariana Arcaya

  4 shared

• Daniel Kifer

  3 shared

• Hongjian Wang

  Southwest Jiaotong University

  3 shared

• Stephen A. Matthews

  Pennsylvania State University

  3 shared

• Zhenhui Li

  3 shared

• Jeffrey W. Lucas

  2 shared

• Alison D. Jones

  Harvard University

  2 shared

Education

• PhD, Sociology

  Harvard University

• RWJ Health and Society Postodoctoral Fellow

  University of Michigan

• MA, Sociology

  Harvard University

Awards & honors

• 2016 Roy Buck Award for best article in social sciences