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Collective Efficacy and Community Crime Rates: A Cross-National Test of Rival Models

Chouhy, Cecilia
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1470043755

Abstract Details

2016, PhD, University of Cincinnati, Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services: Criminal Justice.
The burgeoning number of community-level studies of crime has helped to highlight the importance of contextual effects when understanding differences in crime across communities. Inspired by the Chicago School of social disorganization, communities and crime scholars have focused on disentangling the community characteristics that make them more or less able to control crime. In this context, collective efficacy theory—first articulated in 1997 by Robert Sampson, Stephen Raudenbush, and Felton Earls—has emerged as the most prominent community-level explanation of differential crime rates across geographical units. However, research on the construct of collective efficacy has two main limitations. First, tests of this perspective rarely include measures of rival community-level explanations of crime, particularly perspectives that incorporate cultural features as key elements of their formulations. Thus, the level of legal cynicism (Kirk & Papachristos, 2011) and the endorsement of violence as a way to solve problems within the community (Anderson, 1999; Stewart & Simons, 2010) have been shown to explain variations in crime across communities. Little is known, however, about whether these factors retain their explanatory power in models that also consider collective efficacy or whether collective efficacy remains associated with crime when these cultural conditions are taken into consideration. Second, tests of collective efficacy theory have been conducted primarily on data drawn from communities located in the United States and other advanced Western nations. Accordingly, it is unclear whether collective efficacy theory—as well as other macro-level perspectives—are general theories or whether their explanatory power is specific to the United States and similar nations, the structure of their communities, and the particularity of their crime problem (Sampson, 2006). In this context, using data from the Latin American Population Survey (LAPOP) from 2012 and 2014 collected in 472 communities in five South American countries, this dissertation aims to make a contribution by addressing these two gaps in the communities and crime literature. Specifically, the research strategy involves providing a test of collective efficacy theory and competing community-level theories of crime in five South American Nations With some caveats, the results revealed that collective efficacy theory is generalizable to the South American context. In this sample, collective efficacy operated as a protective factor against crime across these communities. Further, alternative theories of crime—legal cynicism and subculture of violence—were shown to provide important insights into the sources of varying victimization rates across communities. This study advances the area of communities and crime in three ways. First, it reveals the capacity of collective efficacy theory to account for variations in victimization rates in South America—that is, beyond the context of Western industrialized nations. Second, it demonstrates the value of incorporating cultural elements into the study of communities and crime. In this regard, the findings suggest that cultural and control perspectives can be successfully integrated into a more comprehensive understanding of crime. Third, by setting forth an alternative operationalization of collective efficacy, it helps to illuminate the complex relationship between structural characteristics, the different dimensions of collective efficacy, and victimization rates.
Francis Cullen, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Cheryl Lero Jonson, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Michael Benson, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Pamela Wilcox, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
214 p.
Criminology

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Chouhy, C. (2016). Collective Efficacy and Community Crime Rates: A Cross-National Test of Rival Models [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1470043755

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Chouhy, Cecilia. Collective Efficacy and Community Crime Rates: A Cross-National Test of Rival Models. 2016. University of Cincinnati, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1470043755.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Chouhy, Cecilia. "Collective Efficacy and Community Crime Rates: A Cross-National Test of Rival Models." Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1470043755

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1470043755
1,674
© 2016, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Collective Efficacy and Community Crime Rates: A Cross-National Test of Rival Models by Cecilia Chouhy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.