Unravelling the Impact of Neighbourhood Crime on Collective Efficacy and Well-Being

• In Event: Neighborhoods, Cohesion, and Disadvantage

Abstract

A developed literature investigates how neighbourhood crime impacts perceptions of collective efficacy. A parallel popular literature examines how neighbourhood disorder impacts residents’ well-being. However, these two streams rarely converse. Our study addresses this limitation by bridging criminological literature with sociology of mental health research. Specifically, we ask, does the association between neighbourhood crime and collective efficacy mediate the negative impact of local crime rates on residents’ mental health? To answer this question, we use several datasets from Toronto, Canada. Individual-level data come from a uniquely designed study titled the Neighbourhood Effects on Health and Well-Being Study (NEWH, 2012). We match these individual-level data to various crime data from the City of Toronto based on designed neighbourhoods. These data include rates of assault, break and enters, and shootings, for example. We then combine both datasets with census-level measures from the Canadian Marginalization Index (CAN-Marg). For all analyses, we use hierarchical linear modelling (HLM) to appropriately disentangle individual and neighbourhood-level variance. Our preliminary findings provide evidence to support our mediation hypothesis: crime rates have a direct impact on residential well-being, but part of this association is explained through the reduced levels of collective efficacy resulting from the presence of neighbourhood crime.

Authors

• Carly Richards, McMaster University

• Marisa Young, McMaster University