Community Variations in Violence: The Role of Social Ties and Collective Efficacy in Comparative Context

Abstract

This article explores the relative roles of social ties and collective efficacy in explaining community variations in violent victimization in Australia. Using data from a survey of 2,859 residents across 82 communities in the city of Brisbane, coupled with official reported crime data provided by the Queensland Police Service and Australian Bureau of Statistics census data for 2001, the authors employ multilevel statistical models to depict the relative importance of social ties and collective efficacy in predicting between-neighborhood violent victimization in an Australian context. The models include measures of social relationships and communitybased crime prevention programs, and the authors compare and contrast their findings with studies of collective efficacy in Chicago and Stockholm, finding similar results. These findings suggest that despite structural and cultural differences between the United States and Australia in particular, collective efficacy is a significant mechanism in explaining the spatial distribution of self-reported violent victimization in the Australian context. This research underscores the importance of cross-cultural theory testing and the need to further develop the measurement of ecological constructs such as social ties and organizational behavior.

How Young People Peacefully Challenge Community Norms Embedded With Violence in a Brazilian Favela

“…These findings suggest that it is possible to learn through community-based organisations how neighbourhood level changes can occur. Thus, developing strong institutional theories may be informative for developing strategies to reduce structural violence, rather than recording the density of community organisations in an area, a tendency found in other studies (Gardner and Brooks-Gunn 2009;Mazerolle et al 2010).…”

“…Analyses of these processes have focussed on the differential ability of neighbourhoods to self-regulate and studies have found that collective efficacy, defined as 'the linkage of cohesion and mutual trust among residents with shared expectations for intervening in support of neighborhood social control', has the potential to modify rates of violence in some neighbourhoods (Sampson 2013:127). Using survey methods and ecometric modelling collective efficacy has been found to be a predictor of violence in North American, Western European, and Australian cities (Morenoff et al 2001;Sampson et al 2002;Mazerolle et al 2010;Sampson 2013), but weakly related to violent crime rates in London (Sutherland et al 2013) and with no apparent association to violence in Latin American cities.…”

Assessing the effect of the Queensland “Summer of Disasters” on perceptions of collective efficacy

“…Our data do not contain measures of the time participants have lived at their present address, and though we have utilized home ownership as a proxy for this measure, it is still possible that household attachment, which has previously been found to be strongly related to collective efficacy (Mazerolle et al, 2010;Sampson et al, 1997), may further help to explain our results.…”

Delincuencia y violencia en entornos residenciales de Santiago de Chile

“…Ejemplo de esto son los trabajos de Robert Sampson ya citados, así como los de Shaw & McKay (1942), Cohen & Felson (1979), Bursik (1988), y Mazerolle et al (2010). Las diferencias con los contextos latinoamericanos son importantes y se expresan, por ejemplo, en la composición demográfi ca, en los menores niveles de desarrollo económico que implican una fuerte presencia de la economía informal y en la menor capacidad estatal para ejecutar planes y programas que reduzcan el delito, entre otros factores.…”