...Qualitative...Criminology
Vote: Publish pending minor changes
[For votes to count, referees must reasonably explain why they voted as they did. Thus, please explain your vote. If you voted to publish pending minor changes, specify each change, why it is needed, and, possibly, how it should/could be done.]
This study contributes to our knowledge of violence as it explores the often understudied small town. The authors make a great argument for why this population should be studied and the importance of their research. I enjoyed reading the article and have only a few minor grammatical suggestions outlined below.
o The following sentence is confusing. I’m not sure if it is missing a word? “In a rare early example, Dinitz (1973) studied the pseudonymous town of Lincoln (with a population of approximately 11,250 at the time) shunned what it saw as the encroachment of urbanicity and modernity.”
o Both is considered plural, so the following sentence needs to be changed: “both crime and fear of crime exists in both rural and small-town America
o In Figure 3, there is an extra space between other and romantic. I would suggest having a heading for the “alcohol, drug, guns, and gangs” group.
o Suggested edit: “The same commenter, when confronted by another commenter on the suggestion of a Purge, he responds”
o Check periods and commas in this section: “Additional comments suggest that someone should contact the municipal authorities to pressure the landlord to address the problem, reasoning that the tenants were likely receiving housing assistance, For instance, one commenter suggests “I'm guessing the tenants they have are not responsible for their own rent, and so since rent is a given from Metro Housing they most likely do not care who's living there” Thus, commenters make direct links between fighting and poverty.”
o Extra parenthesis: Get the trash off your streets and you wouldn’t have these calls” (ECSU 2017d))
o Suggested edit: “Over thirty years later, when ECSU posted a report of shots were fired outside of a drive-thru grocery on Hancock Street” Patrick commented “GET THOSE PEOPLE OUT OF SANDUSKY!!” (ECSU 2018b).
o Suggested edit: The other side of the ECSU assault discourse – the earnest, yet moralizing, despair for the perceived loss of the small-town idyll – seems to provide a way for area residents to express their displeasure at stories of group violence in a way that does not also cause them to lose any modicum of respectability (Smith 2014).
o Suggested edit: t constitutes an advance in mixed methods approaches by demonstrating how different sources of data (qualitative and quantitative)
o The following article may be helpful to the authors: Frohmann, L. (1997). Convictability and discordant locales: Reproducing race, class, and gender identifies in prosecutorial decisionmaking. Law & Society Review, 31(3), 531-556.
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Great title!