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Investigating the Role of Neighborhood Youth Organizations in Preventing Adolescent Violent Offending: Evidence from Chicago

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Abstract

Objectives

Neighborhood youth organizations are a salient community-level resource in the lives of children and adolescents, but empirical research on the aggregate-level relationship between neighborhood crime rates and neighborhood organizations is mixed. This study attempts to clarify and extend prior research by examining (1) whether there is a contextual effect of neighborhood youth organizations on individual violent offending, and (2) whether neighborhood youth organizations have conditioning, beneficial effects that extend beyond the youths who participate in these organizations.

Methods

Data from two components of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods were utilized in this study: the Community Survey and the Longitudinal Cohort Study. A three-level logistic item response model nested 15,242 violent crime item responses within 1,912 subjects from cohorts aged 9, 12, and 15 years; subjects were nested within 79 neighborhoods across the city of Chicago.

Results

Neighborhood youth organizations did not have a direct, contextual effect on adolescent violent offending. But, the effects of neighborhood youth organizations were heterogeneous in that they reduced the effects of low self-control on violent crime. Moreover, the conditioning role of neighborhood youth organizations operated partly through child-centered informal social control.

Conclusions

Neighborhood organizations matter in the etiology of youthful offending, but the ways in which these organizations are relevant are nuanced. Research must continue to grapple with the various mechanisms through which neighborhood organizations operate. Illuminating these processes may hold key insights for designing and implementing neighborhood organizations to prevent adolescent violent offending.

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Notes

  1. See Raudenbush and Sampson (1999) for a discussion of reliability in three level models.

  2. The first eigenvalue was 2.86, and the difference between the first and second eigenvalues was 2.17; all factor loadings exceeded .70, with three of the four items above .87; and the first factor explained 71 % of the possible variation in neighborhood youth organizations as a whole.

  3. Although child-centered control taps into the type of control that is of interest in this study, we examined the robustness of the findings to the measurement strategy for neighborhood informal social control. The child-centered control scale was, as expected, highly correlated (r = .94) with the full collective efficacy scale, and the main findings presented above were substantively unaltered when substituting the collective efficacy scale for the child-centered control scale.

  4. Based on prior research (see Stewart et al. 2002), we also constructed a neighborhood affluence scale using a weighted factor regression score of four items from the 1990 census: percent of families with income of at least $25,000; percent of females employed; percent of males employed; and percent of the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Because this scale was highly (inversely) correlated with the concentrated disadvantage scale (r = − .84) and its inclusion in the statistical models resulted in multicollinearity, we opted to exclude this variable from the analyses. Note, however, that substituting the neighborhood affluence scale for the concentrated disadvantage scale in the models did not alter the substantive results. Moreover, the neighborhood affluence scale operated as an inverse of concentrated disadvantage in the models.

  5. An alternative approach to modeling the cross-level interaction would be to first test the significance of a random slope variance on self-control, and subsequently think of neighborhood-level variables that could explain the random slope. However, basing the cross-level interactions on a priori substantive arguments is preferable. The power of the statistical tests of the cross-level interaction fixed effects is considerably higher than the power of tests based on the random slopes. In addition, one can test these interactions irrespective of whether a random slope on self-control is found (see Snijders and Bosker 1999: 74–75, 95–96). Nevertheless, we did examine neighborhood variability in the effect of self-control on violent crime by allowing the coefficient for “Low Self-Control” to vary randomly across neighborhoods. Although the results indicated that there was not significant variation in the slope of self-control (τself-control = .25, p > .05) across neighborhoods, the results were substantively unchanged when modeling the cross-level interaction with a random slope on self-control.

  6. Note that neighborhood youth organizations and child-centered informal social control were measured contemporaneously during the 1995 Community Survey and thus the causal order of their association could not be properly established.

  7. We thank one of the reviewers for pointing out that our analysis did not indicate a statistically significant effect of mobility on violent offending, while Sharkey and Sampson (2010) detected mobility effects. Specifically, Sharkey and Sampson (2010) found that moving within Chicago was associated with increased violence, while moving outside of Chicago was associated with decreased violence. Our results were not significant for either moving within or outside of Chicago when disaggregating our variable for mobility (in supplemental analysis). We note, however, that the mobility effects detected by Sharkey and Sampson (2010) were in baseline models without covariates (see Table 5 in their study). In models controlling for other risk factors for violent offending, neither mobility effect was significant at the .05 level (moving outside of Chicago was still significant at the .10 level). We also note that their models predicted violent behavior at wave 3 of the PHDCN, while our models predict violent behavior at wave 2. Furthermore, their sample was restricted to youths from the 9- and 12-year-old cohorts in the LCS, while our sample is comprised of youths in the 9-, 12-, and 15-year-old cohorts. Any of these differences could account for the disparity in study findings related to this variable.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, 417 Churchill Hall, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Gregory M. Zimmerman

  2. Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Brandon C. Welsh

  3. Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Brandon C. Welsh

  4. Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, USA

    Chad Posick

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  1. Gregory M. Zimmerman
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  2. Brandon C. Welsh
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  3. Chad Posick
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Correspondence to Gregory M. Zimmerman.

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Zimmerman, G.M., Welsh, B.C. & Posick, C. Investigating the Role of Neighborhood Youth Organizations in Preventing Adolescent Violent Offending: Evidence from Chicago. J Quant Criminol 31, 565–593 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-014-9238-1

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