Rossi, Peter H.

(b. 1921, New York City). Ph.D. Sociology, Columbia University; B.S. Sociology, City College.

Rossi is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts and has held appointments at Harvard; at the University of Chicago, where he was Director of the National Opinion Research Center; and at Johns Hopkins University.

Rossi is probably best known for his text Evaluation: A Systematic Approach, coauthored originally with Howard Freeman and, after Freeman's death in 1993, with Mark Lipsey. The first edition was published in 1979, and the seventh in 2003. Rossi's contributions to evaluation are much broader and are reflected in a score of published research monographs. Some examples are Families Move (1956), a panel study of the moving decisions of a sample of households; The Education of Catholic Americans (1962, with Andrew M. Greeley), which estimated the effects of attending Catholic schools on the adult occupational attainment of American Catholics; The Roots of Urban Discontent (1974, with Richard Berk and Bettye Eidson), an analysis of how the responses of elites in 15 major cities to the needs and discontents of African Americans affect race relations in those cities; Money, Work and Crime (1980, with Richard Berk and Kenneth Lenihan), a report on a large-scale, randomized experiment estimating the effects of short-term income support given to released felons on postrelease recidivism; Down and Out in America (1989), the social epidemiology of homelessness in Chicago; Just Punishments (1997, with Richard Berk), a comparison of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines to sentences desired by a national sample of Americans; and Feeding the Poor (1999), a synthesis of research on federal food programs for poor Americans.

Rossi participated in several evaluations of major social programs, including those reported in Reforming [Page 383]Public Welfare (1976, with Katherine Lyall), which assessed the New Jersey-Pennsylvania Income Maintenance Experiment; Evaluating Family Preservation (1991), which assessed evaluations of family preservation programs; and Four Evaluations of Welfare Reform: What Will Be Learned? (2001), which assessed major evaluations of the current welfare program, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families.

Growing up in a bilingual working class family in the Great Depression was a powerful influence on Rossi's work as a social scientist and led to a strong concern for issues involving social justice and distributive equity. In his undergraduate years he was a Marxist, but he became a social democrat, a political belief system that melds democratic government, free enterprise, and social welfare public programs. His strong interest in applied social research led quite easily to his concentration on evaluation research.

In graduate school, Rossi was profoundly influenced by the teaching and role modeling of Robert K. Merton, who introduced him to advanced social theory and the importance of empirical evidence in the testing of social theory, and Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his view that the major function of social research in public policy formation and change was to evaluate the effectiveness of public programs. Lazarsfeld became Rossi's graduate school mentor and appointed him to the research staff of Columbia's Bureau of Applied Social Research. Rossi's view of evaluation as the assessment of the effectiveness of social programs has been strongly influenced by the works of Donald T. Campbell, Lee Cronbach, and Michael Scriven.

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