Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World.

Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Around the World

Sampson, Robert J. 2012. Great American city: Chicago and the enduring neighborhood effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN-13: 9780226734569. pp. 552, $27.50 cloth. Robert J. Sampson’s ...

Great American city: Chicago and the enduring neighborhood effect

Neighborhoods and Crime: The Dimensions of Effective Community Control. Robert Bursik , Harold Grasmick

Epidemiological studies suggest that living close to the natural environment is associated with long-term health benefits including reduced death rates, reduced cardiovascular disease, and reduced psychiatric problems. This is often attributed to psychological mechanisms, boosted by exercise, social interactions, and sunlight. Compared with urban environments, exposure to green spaces does indeed trigger rapid psychological, physiological, and endocrinological effects. However, there is little evidence that these rapid transient effects cause long-term health benefits or even that they are a specific property of natural environments. Meanwhile, the illnesses that are increasing in high-income countries are associated with failing immunoregulation and poorly regulated inflammatory responses, manifested as chronically raised C-reactive protein and proinflammatory cytokines. This failure of immunoregulation is partly attributable to a lack of exposure to organisms (“Old Friends”) from mankind’s evolutionary past that needed to be tolerated and therefore evolved roles in driving immunoregulatory mechanisms. Some Old Friends (such as helminths and infections picked up at birth that established carrier states) are almost eliminated from the urban environment. This increases our dependence on Old Friends derived from our mothers, other people, animals, and the environment. It is suggested that the requirement for microbial input from the environment to drive immunoregulation is a major component of the beneficial effect of green space, and a neglected ecosystem service that is essential for our well-being. This insight will allow green spaces to be designed to optimize health benefits and will provide impetus from health systems for the preservation of ecosystem biodiversity.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/110/46/18360.full.pdf

Regulation of the immune system by biodiversity from the natural environment: An ecosystem service essential to health

Political change in britain

Social disorganization theory holds that neighborhoods with a greater population stability, higher socio-economic status and more ethnic homogeneity experience less disorder because these neighborhoods have higher social cohesion and exercise more social control. Recent extensions of the theory argue that disorder in turn affects these structural characteristics and mechanisms. Using a dataset on 74 neighborhoods in the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands spanning ten years, we tested the extended theory, which to date only few studies have been able to do because of unavailability of neighborhood-level longitudinal data. We also improve on previous studies by distinguishing between potential for social control (feelings of responsibility) and actual social control behavior. Cross-sectional analyses replicate earlier findings, but the results of longitudinal cross-lagged models suggest that disorder has large consequences for subsequent levels of social control and population turnover, thus leading to more disorder. This is in contrast to previous research, which sees disorder more as a consequence than a cause. This study underlines the importance of longitudinal data, allowing for simultaneously testing the causes and consequences of disorder, as well as the importance of breaking down social control into the potential for social control and actual social control behavior.

/pdf/a-longitudinal-test-of-social-disorganization-theory-2hlgoexdb6.pdf

A longitudinal test of social disorganization theory: feedback effects among cohesion, social control, and disorder*

To identify how much of the variability of crime in a city can be attributed to micro (street segment), meso (neighborhood), and macro (district) levels of geography. We define the extent to which different levels of geography are important in understanding the crime problem within cities and how those relationships change over time. Data are police recorded crime events for the period 2001–2009. More than 400,000 crime events are geocoded to about 15,000 street segments, nested within 114 neighborhoods, in turn nested within 44 districts. Lorenz curves and Gini coefficients are used to describe the crime concentration at the three spatial levels. Linear mixed models with random slopes of time are used to estimate the variance attributed to each level. About 58–69 % of the variability of crime can be attributed to street segments, with most of the remaining variability at the district level. Our findings suggest that micro geographic units are key to understanding the crime problem and that the neighborhood does not add significantly beyond what is learned at the micro and macro levels. While the total number of crime events declines over time, the importance of street segments increases over time. Our findings suggest that micro geographic units are key to understanding the variability of crime within cities—despite the fact that they have received little criminological focus so far. Moreover, our results raise a strong challenge to recent focus on such meso geographic units as census block groups.

Where the Action is in Crime? An Examination of Variability of Crime Across Different Spatial Units in The Hague, 2001–2009

The crime and place literature lacks a standard methodology for measuring and reporting crime concentration. We suggest that crime concentration be reported with the Lorenz curve and summarized with the Gini coefficient, and we propose generalized versions of the Lorenz curve and the Gini coefficient to correct for bias when crime data are sparse (i.e., fewer crimes than places). The proposed generalizations are based on the principle that the observed crime concentration should not be compared with perfect equality, but with maximal equality given the data. The generalizations asymptotically approach the original Lorenz curve and the original Gini coefficient as the number of crimes approaches the number of spatial units. Using geocoded crime data on two types of crime in the city of The Hague, we show the differences between the original Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient and the generalized versions. We demonstrate that the generalizations provide a better representation of crime concentration in situations of sparse crime data, and that they improve comparisons of crime concentration if they are sparse. Researchers are advised to use the generalized versions of the Lorenz curve and the Gini coefficient when reporting and summarizing crime concentration at places. When places outnumber crimes, the generalized versions better represent the underlying processes of crime concentration than the original versions. The generalized Lorenz curve, the Gini coefficient and its variance are easy to compute.

/pdf/more-places-than-crimes-implications-for-evaluating-the-law-2di2lqd613.pdf

More Places than Crimes: Implications for Evaluating the Law of Crime Concentration at Place

While businesses may attract potential offenders and thus be conducive to disorder, the number of employees could offset this by exercising social control on offenders. This study uses data from different sources to test this expectation across 278 Dutch neighborhoods in the four largest cities of the Netherlands, using multivariate multilevel analysis to disentangle individual perception differences of disorder and neighborhood effects. Attention is paid to traditional explanations of disorder (i.e., poverty, residential mobility, and ethnic heterogeneity). Results show a positive relationship between business presence and neighborhood disorder. We do not find consistent results of the number of employees (i.e., bigger businesses are not always better or worse). Our research demonstrates that the presence of neighborhood businesses could rival the effects of social disorganization theory.

Local Businesses as Attractors or Preventers of Neighborhood Disorder

The present study focuses on Systematic Social Observation (SSO) as a method to investigate physical and social disorder at different units of analysis. The study contributes to the aggregation bias debate and to the ‘social science of ecological assessment’ in two ways: first, by presenting a new model that directly controls for observer bias in ecological constructs and second, by attempting to identify systematic sources of bias in SSO that affect the valid and reliable measurement of physical and social disorder at both street segments and neighborhoods. Data on physical disorder (e.g., litter, cigarette butts) and social disorder (e.g., loitering adults) from 1422 street segments in 253 different neighborhoods in a conurbation of the greater The Hague area (the Netherlands) are analyzed using cross-classified multilevel models. Neighborhood differences in disorder are overestimated when scholars fail to recognize the cross-classified data structure of an SSO study that is due to allocation of street segments to observers and neighborhoods. Not correcting for observer bias and observational conditions underestimates the disorder–crime association at street segment/grid cell level, but overestimates this association at the neighborhood level. Findings indicate that SSO can be used for measuring disorder at both street segment level and neighborhood level. Future studies should pay attention to observer bias prior to their data collection by selecting a minimum number of observers, offering extensive training, and collecting information on the urban background of the observers.

/pdf/measuring-disorder-observer-bias-in-systematic-social-9k2np3ktqh.pdf

Wouter Steenbeek

Papers

A longitudinal test of social disorganization theory: feedback effects among cohesion, social control, and disorder*

Where the Action is in Crime? An Examination of Variability of Crime Across Different Spatial Units in The Hague, 2001–2009

More Places than Crimes: Implications for Evaluating the Law of Crime Concentration at Place

Local Businesses as Attractors or Preventers of Neighborhood Disorder

Measuring Disorder: Observer Bias in Systematic Social Observations at Streets and Neighborhoods