Current Projects

Social Construction of Hate Crimes in the United States: A Factorial Survey Experiment

This project utilizes factorial survey experiments with randomized vignette assignments as the primary research method. Such design opens opportunities to investigate more realistic complexity than traditional survey methods and guarantees internal validity. Psychological scales and demographics are also included in the instrument to capture pre-existing social contexts.

Describing Victims Who Don’t Report: A CART Analysis on Hate Crime Reporting

Using the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), this paper examines the factors related to victims’ reporting behavior on violent hate crime, including demographics (gender, race, education, age, income, geographic location) and the contextual characteristics of the incident (severity, weapon used, multiple offenders, victim-offender relationship). Along with other traditional regression models, this study uses Classification and Regression Tree (CART) to identify and rank the statistically significant determinants in hate crime reporting behavior. CART offers more detailed characteristics of the victims and incidents that are not recorded in official hate crime statistics. As such, it adds new perspectives on the populations at risk. Policy implications are also included.

Publications

Zhang, Chenghui. (2022). “Perceiving Racial Hate Crimes: A Power Relation Perspective”. Journal of Experimental Criminology. Springer. doi: 10.1007/s11292-022-09501-5

Zhang, Chenghui. (2020). “Hate Crime” in Janet P. Stamatel (Ed). From Nation to Nation: Examining Crime and Justice Around the World. ABC-Clio.

Presentations

2021. Zhang, Chenghui. “Constructing Racial Hate Crimes: From Perception to Reporting”. Conference presentation at the American Society of Criminology (ASC) Annual Meeting. Chicago, IL.

2021. Zhang, Chenghui. “Constructing Racial Hate Crimes: Does Respondent Racial Identity Matter?”. Roundtable presentation at the American Sociological Association (ASA) Annual Meeting. Virtual.

2019. Zhang, Chenghui. “Describing Victims Who Don’t Report: A CART Analysis on Hate Crime Reporting”. Conference presentation at the American Society of Criminology (ASC) Annual Meeting. San Francisco, CA.

2017. Zhang, Chenghui. “Hate Groups and Hate Crime in the U.S.” Conference presentation at the American Society of Criminology (ASC) Annual Meeting. Philadelphia, PA.

Research Support

2020. (Awarded) National Institute of Justice. Graduate Research Fellowship. PI: Chenghui Zhang. $50,000.

2019. (not funded) National Science Foundation. Sociology Program - Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Awards (Soc-DDRI). PI: Janet Stamatel. Co-PI: Chenghui Zhang. $11,238.