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, and *Bo Zhang. 2025. “Willingness to Report Hate Crimes: How Attitudes, Police Perceptions, and Sexual Orientation Shape Bystander Response”. Journal of Criminal Justice. doi: 10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2025.102375

Zhang, Chenghui. 2024. “Constructing Hate Crimes: Does Respondent’s Racial/Ethnic Identity Matter?”. Journal of Interpersonal Violence. doi: 10.1177/08862605241301795

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

2024. Zhang, Chenghui. “Developing Research Capacity: NIJ Graduate Research Fellowships”. Panelist at the NIJ 2024 National Research Conference. Pittsburgh, PA.

2024. Zhang, Chenghui. “Bystander Responses on Hate Crimes Targeting Sexual Orientations.” Conference presentation at the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) Annual Meeting. Chicago, IL.

Research Support

2023. College of Liberal Arts, UNLV. Summer Research Award. $7,500.

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