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Robert Apel

@bobapel.bsky.social
1K followers 2.7K following 47 posts

Social scientist at Rutgers with expertise in criminology and social policy

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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
Interesting. This aligns also with Kahneman and Tversky (1979) on asymmetry and loss aversion, where “pains” from losses (negative encounters) are felt more acutely than “pleasures” from equivalent-size gains (positive encounters).
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Stephen Turner @stephenturner.us · 23/04/2026
Data Science Team Training: Building data science capacity in the public health workforce. I'm writing a (free) e-book for public health practitioners upskilling in data science, as part of my work with the CSTE's DSTT program. blog.stephenturner.us/p/data-scien...
blog.stephenturner.us
Data Science Team Training
Building data science capacity in the public health workforce: A free e-book for public health practitioners upskilling in data science.
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Frank Edwards @frankalready.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
foster care has been on the decline nationally over the past ten years. that's a good thing! but there's a group that routinely argue that this is putting kids in danger. @kelleyfong.bsky.social; @bobapel.bsky.social and I checked the evidence (it's null 1/n) jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
jamanetwork.com
Foster Care and Child Maltreatment Mortality Rates in the US
This cross-sectional study of children in state-supervised foster care assesses deaths due to child maltreatment and whether these fatalities are associated with foster care entry rates.
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
This reminds me of my favorite oxymoron, heard at every academic research conference: anecdotal evidence 😆
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Joey Fishkin @fishkin.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
News coverage of the Trump administration's proposed "compact" with universities has been, so far, shockingly bad. I hate to pick on NPR reporter Elissa Nadworny, who's usually a solid reporter, but almost every important thing I heard her say this morning about the proposed "compact" was false.
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
9/ Reproducibility package is on my Github page and includes a pre-publication manuscript, since the published article is not open access: github.com/bobapel-git/...
github.com
GitHub - bobapel-git/demir-apel-2025-jq: Reproducibility package for Demir and Apel (2025), published in Justice Quarterly
Reproducibility package for Demir and Apel (2025), published in Justice Quarterly - bobapel-git/demir-apel-2025-jq
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
8/ Full study is here, with lots of analysis and other interesting findings, along with a case for integrating prospect theory with procedural justice: www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/...
tandfonline.com
Recorded Justice or Procedural Justice? A Randomized Controlled Experiment of the Influence of Body Worn Cameras and Officer Behavior on Citizen Attitudes
We implement cluster randomization to test the impact of procedurally just and unjust police behavior during a hypothetical traffic stop (versus procedurally neutral behavior), in addition to the i...
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
7/ 📢 Bottom line: Procedural justice—the quality of how officers treat people—is more powerful in shaping public attitudes than mere presence of a camera. Cameras might record justice—but only officers can actually deliver it.
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
6/ Even generalized views—like willingness to cooperate with or follow the law—were affected by a single (imagined) traffic stop. But the most powerful effects were on how people judged the officer’s behavior in the moment.
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
5/ 😬 Interestingly, negative encounters had a bigger impact than positive ones. Unfair treatment led to more negative attitudes than fair treatment led to positive ones—evidence of “loss aversion” in how people judge interactions with police.
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
4/ 🎥 What about body-worn cameras? Whether or not the officer said they were wearing a BWC made no difference to people’s attitudes. That’s right: being filmed didn’t help if the officer acted poorly, and didn’t enhance impressions if they acted well.
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
3/ 🚨 Key finding: How the officer behaved mattered—a lot. Respectful, fair treatment improved people’s views of the officer and the police generally. Hostile, unfair behavior worsened views even more strongly.
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
2/ We administered mock traffic stop scenarios portraying different officer behaviors: Procedurally JUST (respectful, fair); procedurally UNJUST (hostile, disrespectful), and procedurally NEUTRAL (standard, no-frills). We also varied whether the officer announced a body camera.
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
1/ Do body-worn cameras (BWCs) improve public attitudes toward the police? Or is how officers treat people what really matters? My new Justice Quarterly article with Mustafa Demir from John Jay tackles these questions with a vignette experiment. 🧵
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
Oh, I wouldn’t suggest eliminating any of them. What I find interesting is that there was a time when divisions basically catered to interests outside of “mainstream criminology” (whatever that means). That hasn’t been true for some time now.
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
I’ve watched with interest as the number of ASC divisions has grown over the course of my career, from 4 to 21. I’m now tempted to start a petition to create an all-new division: Division of Criminology. Curious if there would be any takers.
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
10/ Reproducibility package is on Harvard Dataverse as well as my Github page: github.com/bobapel-git/...
github.com
GitHub - bobapel-git/lageson-apel-2025-crim: Reproducibility package for Lageson and Apel (2025), published in Criminology
Reproducibility package for Lageson and Apel (2025), published in Criminology - bobapel-git/lageson-apel-2025-crim
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
9/ Full study by @sarahlageson.bsky.social and @bobapel.bsky.social is here and is open access: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
The mark or trace of a criminal record: A survey experiment of race and criminal record signaling
Employment discrimination from a criminal record is a salient social fact, evidenced by a robust body of experimental research. In Part 1 of this study, we analyze prior criminal record hiring experi...
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
8/ TLDR: In today’s hiring landscape, the “mark of a criminal record” is alive and well. An unofficial and online “trace of a criminal record” can also hurt job chances. Race interacts with these effects in evolving, complex ways.
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
7/ Why the shift? We discuss several possibilities: “Ban the Box” hiring policies, social movements (e.g., post-George Floyd reckoning), experimental study design (e.g., in-person audit vs. online audit vs. opt-in survey), and greater skepticism toward informal online data.
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
6/ That’s a reversal from older studies, which have shown Black applicants are penalized more for a criminal record. But in a separate part of our paper, we document a closing of this racial gap over the last 20 years.
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
5/ The twist? White applicants with an official criminal record were penalized more than Black applicants with the same record (no racial difference in the impact of a Google hit).
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
4/ We estimate that an official record cut hiring chances by ~42%, and a Google hit for a record (even if not official) cut chances by ~8%. Both had independent effects—meaning, a Google hit adds to the penalty even if the record is already known.
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
3/ We tested how employers responded to fictional applicants by varying: applicant race (Black or White), presence of a criminal record (official background check report), and a Google search "hit" showing a criminal history.
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
2/ Hiring managers still penalize applicants with criminal records—no surprise there. But our study finds even a Google search insinuating a criminal record can reduce a job applicant’s chance of being hired.
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
1/ Can a Google search hurt your chances of getting a job more than a background check? A new study with Sarah Lageson on criminal records, race, and willingness to hire has surprising answers. 🧵
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 23/05/2025
The political theory behind IRA was roughly as follows: We have lost control of the information landscape and can no longer win rhetorical or purely political battles; however, if we make substantive policy progress that directly touches voters' lives, they will notice and reward us.
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
The menswear guy: social theorist. Some interesting history and sociological insight here.
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 21/02/2025
Enjoyable for those interested in history of urban issues. With some justified finger-wagging at Jane Jacobs for hypocrisy: “It was the kind of thing that Jacobs praised, but when she buys the building, she gut renovates it. She tears out the storefront. She turns it into a single-family home.”
theatlantic.com
Americans Are Stuck. Who’s to Blame?
Yoni Appelbaum on his new book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity
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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 12/02/2025
Ok sociology, what do you think are genuine breakthroughs that our field has made. Contributions that might convince skeptical but sympathetic *academics* (not the public) of the value of our field? I'll brainstorm some of mine in the thread - I treat sociology very broadly
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 08/02/2025
Engels estate now taking RFPs
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 18/01/2025
If it helps, there was just a paper published in Sociological Science on changes in the OMB’s standard for measurement of race/ethnicity sociologicalscience.com/download/vol...
sociologicalscience.com
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Rourke O’Brien @rourkeobrien.bsky.social · 07/01/2025
"Fiscal Centralization and Inequality in Children's Economic Mobility" New research with @schechtlm.bsky.social @zparolin.bsky.social just out in ASR doi.org/10.1177/0003... #sociology #demography #econsky
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Sociological Science @sociologicalsci.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
NEW: René D. Flores, Edward Telles, Ilana M. Ventura, "New OMB’s Race and Ethnicity Standards Will Affect How Americans Self-Identify"
sociologicalscience.com
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Heineken should be Heinsman 😆 But I’ll drink to that autocorrect fail!
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Here are some I have used from econ for teaching purposes aside from LaLonde: Fraker and Maynard (1987, JHR); Heckman and Smith (1999, JEP); Cook et al. (2008, JPAM). In other fields: Heineken and Shadish (1996, Psych Methods); Glazerman et al. (2003, Annals); Shadish et al. (2008, JASA).
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 08/11/2024
Second this. We’ve always known about the single-issue voter. But this was the first election I really noticed the single-issue non-voter as being a thing. Really difficult to wrap my head around that.
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 18/10/2024
Alien: Annihilation would be a perfect name for a movie in that franchise
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 09/10/2024
Gothic Murder?
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Heather Urry @heatherurry.io · 29/09/2024
Here's a fun way to encourage students to always look at their data. A few years ago, I wrote a script that converts a black and white png to data and plots it.
Plotted version of png converted to data with regression fit line. It appears there's a positive association between steps and sleep. But the simulated data points spell out "OH NO!"Png showing "OH NO!" in black letters on white background
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David McKenzie @dmckenzie.bsky.social · 29/08/2024
I've just finished the annual update of our curated links on the Development Impact blog, which sort key posts from the last 13 years. First up, technical topics and methods: how to do RCTs, power calcs, DiD, IV, RDD, PAPs, publication, analysis issues, and more: blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...
blogs.worldbank.org
A Curated List of Our Postings on Technical Topics – Your One-Stop Shop for Methodology
This is a curated list of our technical postings, to serve as a one-stop shop for your technical reading. I’ve focused here on our posts on methodological issues in impact evaluation – we also have a ...
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Robert Apel @bobapel.bsky.social · 31/08/2024
Got to see him last month at the Newport Folk Festival. Loved it. A special treat was when Nathaniel Rateliff came out to sing a duet off the most recent album.
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StataTex Blog @statatexblog.com · 23/08/2024
From Jonathan Roth on X: I have created a #DiD Resources page on my website. It has links to all of my DiD teaching slides, coding exercises, and packages I've created. All this info was technically already online, but hopefully this makes it easier to find it! www.jonathandroth.com/did-resources/
jonathandroth.com
DiD Resources
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Chris Goodman @cbgoodman.co · 29/05/2024
I wrote a small r-script to download the SEER county-level population age/race data (single age year and grouped years), break the string apart, and create a full dataset. Is that something people want? I can post it on GitHub.
seer.cancer.gov
U.S. Population Data - SEER Population Data
Download county population estimates used in SEER*Stat to calculate cancer incidence and mortality rates. The estimates are a modification of the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Estimates Program, in ...
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Leo Ahrens @leoahrens.bsky.social · 13/12/2023
I’m releasing ISOCODES, a new Stata package to generate standardized country code variables.   Feed in a string variable identifying countries and isocodes outputs numeric/2-3 letter codes (ISO3166) or full country names.   I’ll give you a short motivation and rundown below.
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Jason Kerwin @jkerwin.bsky.social · 23/01/2024
Social scientists need to write papers but we generally aren't taught how to actually do that. Here is how I get papers out the door, in 10 straightforward steps. 1/N #econsky #socsky #scisky
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Jacob T. Levy @jacobtlevy.bsky.social · 13/01/2024
In today's print edition: www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/arti...
OPINION
Campus culture wars are a teachable moment in how freedom of speech and academic freedom differ
JACOB T. LEVY
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
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