Collective Efficacy and Violent Crime in Chicago Neighborhoods, 1991-1999

This research will assess the direct and indirect effects of collective efficacy on criminal behavior in Chicago. Neighborhood level collective efficacy is an important theoretical and policy - relevant component of the contemporary thinking about the causes of crime and role of informal and formal mechanisms of social control. The design of this research is to reproduce and extend the analyses originally generated by Sampson, et al., 1997 and Morenoff, et al,. 2001. Based on a 1995 citywide community survey of 8,782 residents in 343 neighborhood clusters conducted as part of the NIJ-sponsored Program on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, these published analyses found that collective efficacy directly affects homicide rates, perceived violence, and personal victimization; collective efficacy was also found to moderate the effects of concentrated disadvantage.
This research will use the archived data from the community survey to assess the extent to which the measures and statistical methods in these can be reproduced. We will also extend these analyses to include expanded measures of criminal behavior, alternative definitions of neighborhood, and enhanced tests of the spatial nature of criminal behavior. ca/ncf