Roni Factor is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research brings an interdisciplinary perspective to the question of how the macro-level social context influences individuals’ antisocial and criminal behaviors. In studying these issues, he employs cutting-edge quantitative methods, using a variety of different types of data and research designs. His research so far has focused on three main areas. In the first, he studies how the macro social context and people’s position in society affects high-risk and criminal behavior, with a particular focus on traffic violations and road traffic crashes. In the second, he explores community–police relations and the legitimacy of law-enforcement institutions. In the third, he asks whether there is racial or ethnic bias in the work of law-enforcement institutions and develop new tools to measure it.
Education
2000: B.A., summa cum laude, Department of Sociology and Anthropology and School of Education, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2003: M.A., magna cum laude, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, specialization in Organizational Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2008: Ph.D., Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Transportation Research Institute, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
2011: Post-doctoral Research Fellowship, School of Public Health, Harvard University
Representative publications
Factor, Roni, David Mahalel, Anat Rafaeli, and David R. Williams. 2013. A Social Resistance Perspective for Delinquent Behavior among Non-Dominant Minority Groups. The British Journal of Criminology 53 (5): 784-804
Factor, Roni. 2014. The Effect of Traffic Tickets on Road Traffic Crashes. Accident Analysis & Prevention 64, 86-91
Mehozay, Yoav, and Roni Factor. 2017. Deeply Embedded Core Normative Values and Legitimacy of Law-Enforcement Authorities. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 54(2): 151-180
Factor, Roni. 2019. A Quasi-Experiment Testing a Public Participation Process for Designing and Implementing an Enforcement Program among Minorities. Journal of Experimental Criminology 15:77-86
Factor, Roni, and Miriam Gur-Arye. (2020). Social Solidarity and Sentencing Disparities between Ethnic Groups: The Case of Hit-And-Run Traffic Offenses. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 17:164-185.
Factor, Roni., Gal Kaplan-Harel, Rivka Turgeman, and Simon Perry. 2021. Overcoming the Benchmark Problem in Estimating Bias in Traffic Enforcement: The Use of Automatic Traffic Enforcement Cameras. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 17:217-237.