Gender, Social Ties and Informal Social Control Actions

• In Event: Mechanisms of Neighborhood Informal Social Control

Abstract

Collective efficacy, or the degree to which individuals are invested in their neighborhood and willing to contribute to its common good, is considered one of the hallmarks of a healthy community. Recent scholarship suggests that collective efficacy can operate effectively with weak ties among neighbors. However, research also suggests that women’s social ties, much more so than men’s, are central to community-level crime control. A question remains as to whether or not men and women are equally likely to engage in community level crime-control actions, particularly in the absence of strong ties to their neighbors. It may be that in communities with weak ties, the bulk of the informal social control activity falls to men, while in communities with stronger ties, women engage in a significantly greater proportion of these activities. This is consistent with research on gender differences in free-ridership, which implicates contextual dynamics in explaining these differences. Using survey data from the Australian Collective Capacity Study, we assess gender differences in informal social control behaviors across a range of problem types and test whether neighborhood integration differentially affects whether and how men and women actively contribute to neighborhood crime control.

Authors

• Lisa Broidy, Griffith University

• Rebecca Leigh Wickes, University of Queensland