U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

NCJRS Virtual Library

The Virtual Library houses over 235,000 criminal justice resources, including all known OJP works.
Click here to search the NCJRS Virtual Library

Neighborhood Disorder and Individual Community Capacity: How Incivilities Inform Three Domains of Psychosocial Assessment

NCJ Number
236696
Journal
Sociological Spectrum Volume: 31 Issue: 5 Dated: September-October 2011 Pages: 579-605
Author(s)
Townsand Price-Spratlen
Date Published
October 2011
Length
27 pages
Annotation
This article examines contextual models to bring together the disorder and community capacity perspectives, since both are grounded in social (dis)organization theory and cumulative causation.
Abstract
The author analyzed how individual and neighborhood characteristics, social and physical disorder, and crime affected three individual community capacity outcomes: city quality of life, neighborhood safety, and household moving intentions. The "broken windows" downward spiral suggests that neighborhood incivilities may decrease multiple psychosocial assessments, or, individual community capacities. Consistent with prior research, the authors found that social and physical disorder decreased all three outcomes. Second, the author found that both disorders also mediated neighborhood effects, including socioeconomic status and residential stability. Third, these direct and indirect disorder effects are not altered by prior victimization or neighborhood crime rates. Reducing disorder will, in turn, improve three distinct domains and geographic scales of individual community capacity, and can also reduce the adverse effects of other local area capacity deficits. (Published Abstract)

Downloads

Availability