The Multilevel Effects of Changes in Community Disadvantage on Crime Rates

• In Event: Neighborhood Change, Policy Interventions, and Crime/Disorder

Abstract

Communities and crime research is a dominant area within criminology, but there is some ambiguity about the scale at which associations occur. The influence of any community characteristic on crime at one level of aggregation is distinct from the influence of that characteristic on crime at a different level, and they cannot be discerned from one another without analyzing them together. Additionally, although most research examines community-level associations using cross-sectional data, changes in community characteristics over time may be more important than overall amounts. The current project seeks to examine the multilevel relationship between changes in community disadvantage and crime by measuring disadvantage at both the census tract and city level at two distinct time-points. The data for this project come from three data sources that nest tracts within cities: the National Neighborhood Crime Study (1999-2001), the NIJ Foreclosure and Crime Data Archive (2005-2009), and the American Community Survey. Using two-level hierarchical linear models and a differences-in-difference approach, I parse out the contribution of changes in disadvantage at the tract level from changes in disadvantage at the city level to overall changes in the crime rate. Results indicate differing associations between changes in disadvantage and crime rates at each level.

Author

• Marin Wenger, Florida State University