Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a pervasive social problem that affects victims, families, and communities. Beginning with the acknowledgment of this phenomenon as a social problem, investigations have attempted to answer questions regarding the extent, prevalence, and the possible contributing social and psychological factors that influence this behavior. This study proposes an approach to the problem of IPV based on a unifying concept: social isolation. The authors argue that the utility of the concept of social isolation lies in its ability to encapsulate critical social-structural and social-psychological correlates of IPV. The main objective of the study is to examine the extent to which the role of social isolation in predicting IPV varies by urban/rural context. Measures of key variables were obtained from Waves 1 and 2 of the National Survey of Families and Households and the 1990 census. Results of multivariate analyses indicate that only some measures of social support (isolation) are statistically significant and only for families within rural (nonmetropolitan) counties.

This study extends the macro-level criminological research tradition by examining the links between socioeconomic disadvantage, poverty concentration, and homicide in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan U.S. counties. Most research in this tradition has tested structural theories using urban areas as the unit of analysis. This "urban bias" has resulted in a limited understanding of the social forces driving violence in nonmetropolitan areas. To partially address this problem, we link the literature on the spatial and social organization of nonmetropolitan communities with the social isolation perspective from the urban poverty literature. We hypothesize that the spatial concentration of poverty drives up rates of homicide in both metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas regardless of levels of socioeconomic disadvantage. Negative binomial regression for 1,746 nonmetropolitan and 778 metropolitan counties suggest that both socioeconomic disadvantage and poverty concentration elevate homicide in metropolitan areas. However, in nonmetropolitan counties only socioeconomic disadvantage has a significant impact. We conclude by discussing the implications of these differential findings for the social isolation perspective.

Messner and Rosenfeld's institutional anomie theory is grounded in the assumption that relatively higher crime rates in the United States are due to (1) the overwhelming influence of economic motives and institutions in society, and (2) the subjugation of all other social institutions to cultural economic interests (e.g., the American Dream). Our analysis is designed to extend the limited body of empirical research on this theory in several ways. First, we seek to test the utility of institutional anomie theory for predicting crime rates across aggregate units within the United States (counties). Second, we draw out the theory's emphasis on instrumental crime and suggest that measures of noneconomic social, political, familial, religious, and educational institutions will be particularly relevant for explaining instrumental as opposed to expressive violence. Third, in contrast to prior research, we develop conceptual reasons to expect that these factors will primarily mediate (as opposed to moderate) the relationship between economically motivating pressures and instrumental violence. Our negative binomial regression analyses of data from the Supplementary Homicide Reports and various censuses indicate that the measures of noneconomic institutions perform well in explaining both instrumental and expressive homicides, but that these measures mediate the impact of economic pressures (as measured by the Gini coefficient of family income inequality) to commit instrumental violence most strongly. Further, we find only very limited support for the more popular moderation hypothesis.

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