Socio-Economic Disadvantage and Crime across Large, Urban Neighborhoods

• In Event: Roundtable: Neighborhoods, Communities and Crime

Abstract

Numerous studies have investigated the structural causes of crime, but findings reveal significant inconsistencies across studies. Researchers often rely on social disorganization, collective efficacy, and strain frameworks in explaining the relationship between socio-economic disadvantage and ecological measures crime. While following this design, we acknowledge that these theoretical frameworks conceptualize socio-economic disadvantage and its effects differently. Using the National Neighborhood Crime Study (NNCS) data supplemented with Census data, we estimate separate effects of various measures of socio-economic (dis)advantage on neighborhood homicide, robbery, and motor vehicle theft – three of the most reliable official crime measures. Preliminary regression analyses reveal that several indicators of socio-economic disadvantage predict violent and property crime in the theoretically expected direction, but a combined disadvantaged index that includes neighborhood-level measures of family, employment, and economic factors serves as a more consistent and robust predictor of all three of these crime outcomes. We relate our findings to the processes that underlie core theoretical concepts from social disorganization, collective efficacy, and strain perspectives.

Authors

• Jon Tostoe, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Cindy Brooks Dollar, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro