Crime is not the only problem: Examining why violence & adverse health outcomes co-vary across large U.S. counties

Abstract

Beginning with the moral statisticians, social science researchers have shown interest in explaining why outcomes like crime and disease varied together across aggregate social communities. Underlying this interest was a notion that deleterious social phenomena exhibit persistent and regularized variation across geospatial units because they are influenced by a common set of underlying causes. But because of specialization trends in the social sciences, our grasp of the degree to which crime and other undesirable social phenomena vary together across macro-social units, or our ability to explain that covariance, has not sufficiently progressed. This study sought to reinvigorate interest in documenting and explaining the overlap of crime and adverse health outcomes. It examined the extent of covariance between both criminal (homicide) and non-criminal (infant mortality and sexually transmitted diseases) deleterious social outcomes across 524 large U.S. counties. Drawing from social disorganization, immigrant revitalization, racial isolation, and social support perspectives, the study posited hypotheses arguing that lethal violence and two adverse health events are similarly impacted by theory-specified explanatory factors. Findings reveal support for each theoretical perspective and identify important “common causes” that are reasons why homicide, infant mortality and sexually transmitted diseases co-vary across aggregate social communities.