Using 311 reports to assess capacity for informal social control at the individual and neighborhood levels: Measurement and validation

• In Event: New Approaches to Measuring and Modeling Crime-Relevant Neighborhood Social Processes

Abstract

Informal social control plays a vital role in the management of crime levels in urban communities. Nearly all work to date has measured it indirectly at the neighborhood level through hypothetical survey items. We demonstrate a methodology that builds on this work by using ~1,000,000 constituent requests for government service through Boston, MA’s 311 hotline to measure the propensity to contribute to informal social control for over 50,000 thousands individuals; and to then aggregate these individual-level measures into performance-based indicators of a neighborhood’s capacity for informal social control. We use case types in the 311 data to identify custodians who have used the system to take action on issues in the public domain (e.g., street light outages), and then further divide them based on volume of reporting and whether they have taken action on man-made incivilities (e.g., graffiti). We validate these groupings by linking 311 accounts with a survey of users (n = 687) including self-reported inclination to enforce social norms. We use the different classes of custodian to create multiple census tract-level measures of capacity for informal social control, examining their ability to predict a neighborhood’s ability to address multiple types of issues.

Authors

• Daniel O'Brien, Northeastern University

• Robert J. Sampson, Harvard University