Disagreement in Assessing Neighboring and Collective Efficacy: The Role of Social Distance

Abstract

Whereas existing research typically treats variability in residents' reports of collective efficacy and neighboring as measurement error, the authors consider such variability as of substantive interest in itself. This variability may indicate disagreement among residents with implications for the neighborhood collectivity. The authors propose using a general measure of social distance based on several social dimensions (rather than measures based on a single dimension such as racial/ethnic heterogeneity or income inequality) to help understand this variability in assessments. The authors use data from wave I (2001) of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (n = 3,570) to aggregate respondents into egohoods of two different sizes: quarter-mile and half-mile radii. Consistent with expectations, neighborhoods with higher levels of general social distance have higher variability in reports of neighboring and the two components of collective efficacy, cohesion and informal social control.

Police Legitimacy and the Norm to Cooperate: Using a Mixed Effects Location-Scale Model to Estimate the Strength of Social Norms at a Small Spatial Scale

“…By contrast, LSOAs are less concerned about the size of the geographical area instead, they try to achieve consistency in population size. As demonstrated by several authors, geographical proximity is more pertinent to defining neighbourhoods than population size (e.g., Williams and Hipp, 2018;Hipp, 2012), which again leads us to believe that hexagons have more desirable characteristics than LSOAs. Stratified clustered random sampling strategy was used to select neighborhood residents with strata defined by eight Neighborhood Policing Units (NPU), which were further divided into four strata each resulting in 32 strata overall.…”

“…Neighborhoods play a central role in developing and maintaining social ties and strengthening community cohesion. Much research has found that shared places such as parks, high streets, cafés or community centres act as social conduits creating an opportunity for interaction among neighborhood residents (Williams and Hipp, 2018;Wo, 2016). Ultimately, these social interactions engender an augmented sense of community, resulting in enhanced community cohesion.…”

“…This can lead to artificial positive or null-findings due to the mismatch in the aggregation of the social context of interest (Hipp, 2007;Hipp et al, 2012). Focusing on real communities is important, as the increased number of interactions among residents is a key element of enhancing community cohesion and informal social control in the area (Williams and Hipp, 2018;Wo, 2016), which, in turn, lead to increased cooperation.…”

Collective efficacy and violent crime in suburban housing estates

“…An intriguing but rather undeveloped aspect of collective efficacy theory concerns the exact nature of collective efficacy and its subjects (Hipp et al, 2018;Hipp, 2016). In many cases the empirical implementations of the theory have been rather ambiguous about the ways in which a given neighbourhood's 'capacity to intervene' could be communicated to potential offenders and whether the deterrent effect operates similarly in crimes that take place in different settings (see Hipp and Steenbeek, 2015).…”

Social and Physical Neighbourhood Effects and Crime: Bringing Domains Together Through Collective Efficacy Theory

“…Reducing the scale to 1500 residents, Sutherland et al (2013) found CE to be 'considerably weaker' in explaining decreases in crime across London, UK. Social explanations for such disparities have considered the level of agreement-or rather, disagreement-amongst respondents within the same neighbourhood regarding perceptions of social cohesion and social control (Brunton-Smith et al 2018;Oberwittler and Wikström 2009;Hipp et al 2018). Taking the 'small is better approach' further, we see that the relevance of physical features within settings can also shape how CE operates on the ground.…”