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

TLDR

Fear of crime is thought to arise from community disorder cues in the social and physical environment, distinct from actual crime. The study employed three ecological measures—resident surveys, trained rater observations, and newspaper content analysis—aggregated to block or neighborhood levels, all demonstrating reliable and comparable predictive power for fear of crime. The results indicate that each disorder measure predicts fear of crime similarly, supporting theories linking community disorder to fear and underscoring implications for ecological assessment.

Abstract

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.