Do the Invariant Findings of Land,McCall,and Cohen Generalize to Cross-National Studies of Social Structure and Homicide?

Abstract

The Land, McCall, and Cohen study is one of the most highly cited articles in the social structure and homicide literature. In it, the authors found that three structural covariates—resource deprivation, population size and density, and divorce—were consistently associated with U.S. homicide rates over several decades, even when employing different units of analysis. In this article, we review 65 studies to determine whether Land, McCall, and Cohen’s invariant findings for these three structural covariates generalize to the cross-national empirical literature on social structure and homicide. We conclude that the findings for population structure and divorce are inconsistent in this literature but that there is relatively consistent evidence for an association between homicide and some form of resource deprivation cross-nationally. Based on our review, we also discuss two current directions of this literature and critically assess—much like Land, McCall, and Cohen did for the U.S. literature at the time—the current state of the scientific record on the topic of social structure and homicide at the cross-national level.