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Ecological assessments of community disorder: Their relationship to fear of crime and theoretical implications

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American Journal of Community Psychology

Abstract

Researchers suggest that fear of crime arises from community disorder, cues in the social and physical environment that are distinct from crime itself. Three ecological methods of measuring community disorder are presented: resident perceptions reported in surveys and on-site observations by trained raters, both aggregated to the street block level, and content analysis of crime- and disorder-related newspaper articles aggregated to the neighborhood level. Each method demonstrated adequate reliability and roughly equal ability to predict subsequent fear of crime among 412 residents of 50 blocks in 50 neighborhoods in Baltimore, MD. Pearson and partial correlations (controlling for sex, race, age, and victimization) were calculated at multiple levels of analysis: individual, individual deviation from block, and community (block/neighborhood). Hierarchical linear models provided comparable results under more stringent conditions. Results linking different measure of disorder with fear, and individual and aggregated demographics with fear inform theories about fear of crime and extend research on the impact of community social and physical disorder. Implications for ecological assessment of community social and physical environments are discussed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Environment and Behavior Area, FCS Department, AEB, University of Utah, 84112, Salt Lake City, Utah

    Douglas D. Perkins

  2. Temple University, USA

    Ralph B. Taylor

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  1. Douglas D. Perkins
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  2. Ralph B. Taylor
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Additional information

This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health grants 1-R01-MH40842-01 and-02 from the Center for Violent and Antisocial Behavior, R.B.T., principal investigator, D.D.P., project director. R.B.T. also received support from grants IJ-CX-93-0022 and 94-IJ-CX-0018 from the National Institute of Justice during preparation of this manuscript. Opinions are solely those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or official policies of the National Institute of Justice or the Department of Justice. This article benefitted in too many ways to list from the comments of Barbara B. Brown, Ron Davis, Marybeth Shinn, and anonymous reviewers on earlier drafts. Kenneth Maton and his students assisted in the collection of the on-site observational data. Jim Leflar and Sunil Madhugiri helped with the newspaper sampling and content analysis. D.D.P.'s students in Research Methods assisted in analyzing the interrater agreement of the newspaper content analysis procedure. Interviewing was carried out by Survey Research Associates of Baltimore.

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Perkins, D.D., Taylor, R.B. Ecological assessments of community disorder: Their relationship to fear of crime and theoretical implications. Am J Commun Psychol 24, 63–107 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02511883

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