By JEREMY G. BURTON
The Associated Press

SCRANTON, Pa. (AP) — People like to think they know their bars in Scranton, where per capita there are twice as many active liquor licenses as in Philadelphia.

But nobody here looks at bars quite like James Roberts, Ph.D., who is one of the few people in the U.S. doing academic research on them.

“A lot of people think they know the typical causes of problem behavior, and the common answer to why people fight in bars is always alcohol,” said Roberts, a University of Scranton professor of criminal justice. “Part of the research is to dispel the myth that alcohol is the sole contributor to violence in bars, looking at other factors that are largely disregarded.”

Whether it is the effects of crowd size, live music, a building’s layout, the temperature, bouncers or drinking by bartenders, the 34-year-old Roberts has spent countless hours cataloging the details of places that some patrons will barely remember the next morning.

Alcohol is a “major factor,” of course, but Roberts said if communities and policymakers can understand all these other “predictors of problem behavior,” then people can find better ways to reduce fights, domestic assaults, drunken driving and public disorder crimes.

Every week in Scranton, police are dispatched to quell violence at bars, some of which are often a nexus for more serious investigations, too.

There have also been high-profile deaths. Earlier this year, a woman sued the downtown Colosseum Night Club & Lounge over the death of her son, who was allegedly assaulted by the club’s staff. Last week, a widow sued four Upvalley businesses that she alleges served alcohol to her husband prior to a crash that killed him.

Roberts’ work suggests that well-trained bouncers, despite a bad reputation, are critical to bar safety. And he has also explored the continued serving of patrons who are already drunk.

Government officials and bar owners, however, will only listen if the research is scientific and systematic, Roberts said. Which means “a lot of hours sitting in bars and watching nothing, watching people get drunk and act badly.”

When violence does erupt, it can get ugly fast. And, Roberts himself has had a few close encounters.

When he was a college student in Pomona, N.J., studying bars near his hometown on the Jersey Shore, Roberts tried to interview a bouncer. Suddenly, several bouncers surrounded him and took him to a back room to be interrogated by the owner. Out of fright, Roberts said he began rattling off names of local bars where he had worked to convince them he was harmless.

Another time, as a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University studying the Hoboken bar scene, a man thought Roberts was leering at his bartender girlfriend and tried to instigate a fight.

Roberts — who lives in Clarks Green with his wife, Jenny Roberts, a Luzerne County assistant district attorney — did not always envision a career of dodging angry boyfriends and jotting down notes in bathroom stalls. He wanted to be a police officer until college, when he realized he really enjoyed doing research.

Since joining Scranton’s faculty in 2005, Roberts has been featured in The New York Times and cited in a seminal book titled “Raising the Bar: Preventing Aggression in and Around Bars, Pubs and Clubs,” written by Canadian social scientist Kathryn Graham and Australian criminologist Ross Homel.

In the U.S., serious study of bars is only beginning to find a foothold, Roberts said. But if anyone understands the skepticism, it is him.

“I remember thinking, ‘What the heck am I doing?’” Roberts said. While paying his way through school by working at local bars, Roberts took a professor’s suggestion to turn his summer job into a master’s thesis. The experience gave him a front-row seat to a cauldron of aggression at some of the Jersey Shore’s wildest clubs and pubs.

“It really made me start thinking more about why this bar and not this other bar?” he said.

Now, Roberts is interviewing dozens of musicians about the effect they have on the Scranton venues where they play. The assumption is that loud, aggressive bands breed loud, aggressive people, but live music is “probably one of the most misunderstood aspects of the whole barroom landscape,” he said.

Roberts also wants to do a study here similar to the one in Hoboken. There, the bars researched were popular with younger crowds, but would the same indicators hold true with different demographics?

To find out, Roberts will have plenty of bars from which to choose. State records show that in Scranton there are about 200 places actively licensed to sell alcohol.