Let's take a look at the actual citation:

Taken from a forthcoming paper by Sampson and Kristin L. Perkins, “Compounded Deprivation in the Transition to Adulthood: The Intersection of Racial and Economic Inequality among Chicagoans, 1995-2013,” in the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences.

Professor Sampson has an endowed chair at Harvard and was previously the chair of his department there. While I have not yet gone looking for preprint versions, I'm willing to entertain the possibility that he might have a firm grasp on the difference between statistical and anecdotal information. I see no reason for the author of the Atlantic article to recapitulate the methodology of every single academic reference in a long discussion of social policy.