Kai Theodor Erikson (born February 12, 1931)[1] is an Austrian-born American sociologist, noted as an authority on the social consequences of catastrophic events.
[6] Erikson graduated from The Putney School in Vermont, Reed College in Oregon and earned a PhD at the University of Chicago.
He joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh in 1959 where he held a joint appointment at the School of Medicine and in the Department of Sociology.
The sociological premise explored is from Émile Durkheim: "a function of deviance is to define the normative boundaries of the group."
On the statistical analysis Ross comments: "the reasons to expect constancy of deviance over time, such as the limited capacity of the control system, would seem to predict stability of convictions as much as stability of offenders, and in consequence the analysis here seems unsatisfactory.”[8] Erikson subsequently studied a number of disasters in the context of their sociological implications, including the nuclear fallout in the Marshall Islands in 1954; the Buffalo Creek flood in West Virginia in 1972 (resulting in the award-winning 1978 book Everything In Its Path); the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979; the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989; and the genocide in Yugoslavia of 1992 to 1995.