The comparative context of collective efficacy: Understanding neighbourhood disorganisation and willingness to intervene in Seattle and Brisbane

Abstract

The collective efficacy literature provides a framework to understand how neighbourhood structure influences violence. Existing findings have been based largely on American cities where disadvantage and ethnic segregation are more concentrated. Thus, they are not always representative of other Western cities where structural disadvantage has a different history as well as less variation across neighbourhoods. This paper explores the comparative effect of collective efficacy in Seattle, USA, and Brisbane, Australia. Findings show that collective efficacy is a significant predictor of violent victimisation in both cities. However, in Brisbane, traditional measures of structural disorganisation are less of an influence on victimisation than in Seattle, and that collective efficacy as a neighbourhood process can exist and vary across neighbourhoods without extreme disorganisation.

Do Differences in Social Environments Explain Gender Differences in Recreational Walking across Neighbourhoods?

“…As observed in earlier studies [23,82], it is likely that our findings are context-specific. Cities vary widely in their cultural and structural characteristics (such as levels of welfare support, concentration of poverty and ethnic diversity) [83], and local governments shape neighbourhood environments through planning, implementation, delivery of services, infrastructure, and policies [30]. Brisbane is a medium density urban environment characterised by low crime rates and managed by a single City Council [84], located within a high income country (Australia) with well-established welfare provisions [83].…”

“…In other words, neighbourhood-level factors might differentially influence the recreational walking of men and women, and women seemed more sensitive to their environments. Nonetheless, the social environment did not appear to be one of these factors in Brisbane, an urban setting where structural differences between neighbourhoods might not be as extreme as in other cities [83], hinting at other neighbourhood-level characteristics.…”

Perceptions of “others,” risk, and counter terrorism-related informal social control

“…Informal social control is typically measured by asking survey respondents to indicate how likely it is members of their community would intervene in a range of negative community behaviors thought to promote crime (Fay-Ramirez, 2015; Sampson & Raudenbush, 1999; Sampson et al., 1997). Following criminological literature, perceptions of national security related informal social control is constructed as a scale of eight survey items measuring perceptions of informal social control of suspicious behaviors indicative of a national security threat (α = 0.93).…”

“… 4 Census data could be used to group survey respondents into Statistical Local Areas that would approximate a neighborhood or suburb as has been done in other Australian research (Fay-Ramirez, 2015). However, the overall number of survey respondents and their spread across the nation does not provide enough statistical power to nest these data in a meaningful way.…”

(Mis)Perceptions of Ethnic Group Size and Consequences for Community Expectations and Cooperation With Law Enforcement

“…Thus, their analysis controls for respondent identity as White, Black, Asian, or Hispanic. In the Australian context, typical measures of race are not commonly used, given the diversity of ethnic groups found in Australia (Fay-Ramirez, 2014). However, in order to control whether majority White Australians perceive ethnic group size differently to those of a different ethnicity, we utilize a binary variable that indicates whether the respondent primarily identifies as Caucasian/White (1) as opposed to another race or ethnicity (0).…”