Abstract
This study aims to (1) explore perceptions of property crime at the neighborhood level and their correlates based on a random sample from Guangzhou, China and (2) assess the applicability of collective efficacy theory in contemporary urban China. Since the data used in this study are multilevel and the dependent variable is dichotomous, a generalized hierarchical linear model was used for analysis of the data. This study reveals that both community structural variables (residential stability and poverty) and community process variables (social ties, collective efficacy and semi-formal control) were found to affect individuals’ perceptions of neighborhood property crime in Guangzhou. However, communities in Guangzhou are different from those in big cities in the US. This is evidenced by several findings in this study: (1) poorer communities in Guangzhou were not associated with lower levels of formal and informal control; (2) communities with higher levels of residential mobility were neither linked to higher levels of poverty nor disorganization; and (3) the correlation between residential stability and perceived neighborhood property crime was not mediated by community processes.
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Notes
Since people who lived in Guangzhou for less than 6 months were not counted as local residents, the actual number of transient people in Guangzhou was probably much higher.
Robbery is defined as “taking or attempting to take property by force, threat of force or other methods” in China. China’s Criminal Law lists robbery as part of crime again property. Thus, in our study, the variable “perceptions of neighborhood property crime” included perceptions of neighborhood robbery.
There are two reasons for collapsing the outcome into a dichotomous variable. First, the proportion of more than 1 time in the past 6 months was small. Second, this study was interested primarily in examining whether a neighborhood had a crime in the past 6 months and why it had a crime or not, but not in the differences between 1 crime and more than 1 crime in the past 6 months.
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Jiang, S., Land, K.C. & Wang, J. Social Ties, Collective Efficacy and Perceived Neighborhood Property Crime in Guangzhou, China. Asian Criminology 8, 207–223 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-013-9167-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-013-9167-1