Abstract
AbstractExisting studies have generally measured collective efficacy by combining survey respondents’ ratings of their local area into an overall summary for each neighborhood. Naturally, this approach results in a substantive focus on the variation in average levels of collective efficacy between neighborhoods. In this article, we focus on the variation in consensus of collective efficacy judgments. To account for differential consensus among neighborhoods, we use a mixed‐effects location‐scale model, with variability in the consensus of judgments treated as an additional neighborhood‐level random effect. Our results show that neighborhoods in London differ, not just in their average levels of collective efficacy but also in the extent to which residents agree with one another in their assessments. In accord with findings for U.S. cities, our results show that consensus in collective efficacy assessments is affected by the ethnic composition of neighborhoods. Additionally, we show that heterogeneity in collective efficacy assessments is consequential, with higher levels of criminal victimization, worry about crime, and risk avoidance behavior in areas where collective efficacy consensus is low.
Highlights
Existing studies have generally measured collective efficacy by combining survey respondents’ ratings of their local area into an overall summary for each neighborhood
Using data from a large random survey of London residents, we extend the standard two-level, mixed-effects model commonly employed in neighborhood effects research to a mixed-effects, locationscale model (Hedeker, Mermelstein, and Demirtas, 2008)
Where the signs and signifiers of local interpersonal trust, social cohesion, and willingness to intervene are “noisy,” the protective effects of CE in a local area will be diminished and, by the same token, will be accentuated in areas where the CE “signal” is stronger (Jackson, 2006). These expectations lead to our first hypothesis: Hypothesis 1 (H1): The negative association between average levels of CE and individual-level worry about victimization within local areas is stronger at higher levels of CE consensus
Summary
First set out in Sampson and colleagues’ pioneering research on the spatial patterning of crime in the city of Chicago (Morenoff, Sampson, and Raudenbush, 2001; Sampson, 2012; Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls, 1997), CE has been proposed as the key social-psychological factor to account for why some neighborhoods with predisposing structural characteristics— socioeconomic disadvantage, residential mobility, and ethnic heterogeneity—experience high levels of crime, whereas others do not In these and subsequent studies (Mazerolle, Wickes and McBroom, 2010; Odgers et al, 2009; Zhang, Messner, and Liu, 2007), scholars have found that socially cohesive neighborhoods are characterized by cross-cutting social networks and high levels of interpersonal trust, combined with a willingness of residents to intervene to prevent norm-deviant behavior. Serves as a useful test bed for assessing the generality of Browning, Dirlam, and Boettner’s (2016) conclusions regarding the U-shaped relationship between immigrant concentration and CE consensus to urban environments outside the United States
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