Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Shaw and McKay advanced social disorganization theory in the 1930s, kick-starting a large body of research on communities and crime. Studies emphasize individual impacts of poverty, residential instability, and racial/ethnic heterogeneity by examining their independent effects on crime, adopting a variable-centered approach. We use a “neighborhood-centered” approach that considers how structural forces combine into unique constellations that vary across communities, with consequences for crime. Examining neighborhoods in Southern California we: (1) identify neighborhood typologies based on levels of poverty, instability, and heterogeneity; (2) explore how these typologies fit within a disorganization framework and are spatially distributed across the region; and (3) examine how these typologies are differentially associated with crime. Results reveal nine neighborhood types with varying relationships to crime.

Keywords

neighborhoods crime social disorganization latent class analysis

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Abbott

(1992). From causes to events: Notes on narrative positivism. Sociological Methods & Research, 20, 428–455.

Bellair

P. E.

(1997). Social interaction and community crime: Examining the importance of neighbor networks. Criminology, 35, 677–704.

Boessen

Hipp

J. R.

(2015). Close-ups and the scale of ecology: Land uses and the geography of social context and crime. Criminology, 53, 399–426.

Branic

Kubrin

C. E.

(2018). Gated communities and crime in the United States. In Bruinsma

Johnson

(Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of environmental criminology (pp. 401–423). Oxford University Press.

Brantingham

P. J.

Brantingham

P. L.

(1984). Patterns in crime. MacMillan.

Bursik

R. J.

(1988). Social disorganization and theories of crime and delinquency: Problems and prospects. Criminology, 26, 519–552.

Bursik

R. J. J.

(Ed.). (1984). Ecological theories of delinquency since Shaw and McKay [Paper presentation]. American Society of Criminology meetings in Cincinnati, OH.

Hannon

Knapp

(2003). Reassessing nonlinearity in the urban disadvantage/violent crime relationship: An example of methodological bias from log transformation. Criminology, 41, 1427–1448.

Hannon

L. E.

(2005). Extremely poor neighborhoods and homicide. Social Science Quarterly, 86, 1418–1434.

10.

Hill

K. G.

White

H. R.

Chung

I. J.

Hawkins

J. D.

Catalano

R. F.

(2000). Early adult outcomes of adolescent binge drinking: Person- and variable-centered analyses of binge drinking trajectories. Alcoholism Clinical and Experimental Research, 24, 892–901.

11.

Hipp

J. R.

Bauer

D. J.

(2006). Local solutions in the estimation of growth mixture models. Psychological Methods, 11, 36–53.

12.

Hipp

J. R.

Kubrin

C. E.

(2017). From Bad to worse: How changing inequality in nearby areas impacts local crime. RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 3, 129–151.

13.

Hipp

J. R.

Yates

D. K.

(2011). Ghettos, thresholds, and crime: Does concentrated poverty really have an accelerating increasing effect on crime? Criminology, 49, 955–990.

14.

Krivo

L. J.

Peterson

R. D.

(1996). Extremely disadvantaged neighborhoods and urban crime. Social Forces, 75, 619–648.

15.

Kubrin

C. E.

(2000). Racial heterogeneity and crime: Measuring static and dynamic effects. In Chekki

D. A.

(Ed.), Research in community sociology (Vol. 10, pp. 189–218). JAI Press.

16.

Kubrin

C. E.

Hipp

J. R.

(2016). Do fringe banks create fringe neighborhoods? Examining the spatial relationship between fringe banking and neighborhood crime rates. Justice Quarterly, 33, 755–784.

17.

Kubrin

C. E.

Weitzer

(2003). New directions in social disorganization theory. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 40, 374–402.

18.

Kubrin

C. E.

(2016). Social disorganization theory’s greatest challenge: Linking structural characteristics to crime in socially disorganized neighborhoods. In Piquero

A. R.

(Ed.), Handbook of criminological theory (pp. 121–136). Wiley-Blackwell.

19.

Labouvie

E. W.

Pandina

R. J.

Johnson

(1991). Developmental trajectories of substance use in adolescence: Differences and predictors. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 14, 305–328.

20.

Muthén

L. K.

Muthén

B. O.

(1998–2007). MPlus user’s guide (5th ed.). Muthén and Muthén.

21.

Ousey

G. C.

Kubrin

C. E.

(2018). Immigration and crime: Assessing a contentious issue. Annual Review of Criminology, 1, 63–84.

22.

Sampson

R. J.

Morenoff

J. D.

Gannon-Rowley

(2002). Assessing neighborhood effects: Social processes and new directions in research. Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 443–478.

23.

Shaw

C. R.

McKay

(1969 [1942]). Juvenile delinquency and urban areas. University of Chicago Press.

24.

Small

M. L.

Manduca

R. A.

Johnston

W. R.

(2018). Ethnography, neighborhood effects, and the rising heterogeneity of poor neighborhoods across cities. City and Community, 17, 565–589.

25.

Smith

D. A.

Jarjoura

G. R.

(1988). Social structure and criminal victimization. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 25, 27–52.

26.

Stark

(1987). Deviant places: A theory of the ecology of crime. Criminology, 25, 893–910.

27.

Steinley

(2003). Local optima in K-Means clustering: What you don’t know may hurt you. Psychological Methods, 8, 294–304.

28.

Warner

B. D.

Pierce

G. L.

(1993). Reexamining social disorganization theory using calls to the police as a measure of crime. Criminology, 31, 493–517.

29.

Warner

B. D.

Rountree

P. W.

(1997). Local social ties in a community and crime model: Questioning the systemic nature of informal social control. Social Problems, 44, 520–536.

30.

Warner

T. D.

(2016). Up in smoke: Neighborhood contexts of marijuana use from adolescence through young adulthood. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 45, 35–53.

31.

Warner

T. D.

(2018). Adolescent sexual risk taking: The distribution of youth behaviors and perceived peer attitudes across neighborhood contexts. Journal of Adolescent Health, 62, 226–233.

32.

Warner

T. D.

Settersten

Jr. (2017). Why neighborhoods (and how we study them) matter for adolescent development. Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 52, 105–152.

33.

Wilson

W. J.

(1987). The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. University of Chicago Press.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.87 MB

(Re)conceptualizing Neighborhood Ecology in Social Disorganization Theory: From a Variable-Centered Approach to a Neighborhood-Centered Approach

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References

Supplementary Material