Measuring neighborhood social processes using georeferenced location reports: The Adolescent Health and Development in Context Study

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

Abstract

Recent decades have seen the development of innovative approaches to measuring features of neighborhoods such as informal social control and social/physical disorder using survey data. This research has yielded a range of important findings on the role of neighborhood social processes in explaining area-level variation in crime. However, the expense of fielding large-scale social surveys sufficient to produce reliable estimates of social process measures at the neighborhood level is often prohibitive. Moreover, aggregated neighborhood reports typically result in ambiguity regarding the boundaries of the area being assessed and neglect potentially substantial within-neighborhood variability in social processes. We describe a novel approach to the measurement of informal social control and disorder using data from the Adolescent Health and Development in Context study on neighborhood and routine activity locations for a sample of over 1300 residents and over 10000 specific location reports. We model variability in multi-item measures of informal social control and disorder across space using models for the simultaneous analysis of point and areal data. This approach efficiently captures variability in social processes across space with a relatively high degree of precision combining both resident and non-resident location reports.

Authors

• Christopher Browning, Ohio State University

• Catherine A. Calder, Ohio State University

• Brian Soller, University of New Mexico

• Anna L. Smith, Ohio State University

• Bethany Boettner, Ohio State University