Community Crime Prevention and Intimate Violence in Chicago, 1995-1998

This study sought to answer the question: If a woman is
 experiencing intimate partner violence, does the collective efficacy
 and community capacity of her neighborhood facilitate or erect
 barriers to her ability to escape violence, other things being equal?
 To address this question, longitudinal data on a sample of 210 abused
 women from the CHICAGO WOMEN'S HEALTH RISK STUDY, 1995-1998 (ICPSR
 3002) were combined with community context data for each woman's
 residential neighborhood taken from the Chicago Alternative Policing
 Strategy (CAPS) evaluation, LONGITUDINAL EVALUATION OF CHICAGO'S
 COMMUNITY POLICING PROGRAM, 1993-2000 (ICPSR 3335). The unit of
 analysis for the study is the individual abused woman (not the
 neighborhood). The study takes the point of view of a woman standing
 at a street address and looking around her. The characteristics of the
 small geographical area immediately surrounding her residential
 address form the community context for that woman. Researchers chose
 the police beat as the best definition of a woman's neighborhood,
 because it is the smallest Chicago area for which reliable and
 complete data are available. The characteristics of the woman's police
 beat then became the community context for each woman. The beat,
 district, and community area of the woman's address are
 present. Neighborhood-level variables include voter turnout
 percentage, organizational involvement, percentage of households on
 public aid, percentage of housing that was vacant, percentage of
 housing units owned, percentage of feminine poverty households,
 assault rate, and drug crime rate. Individual-level demographic
 variables include the race, ethnicity, age, marital status, income,
 and level of education of the woman and the abuser. Other
 individual-level variables include the Social Support Network (SSN)
 scale, language the interview was conducted in, Harass score, Power
 and Control score, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) diagnosis,
 other data pertaining to the respondent's emotional and physical
 health, and changes over the past year. Also included are details
 about the woman's household, such as whether she was homeless, the
 number of people living in the household and details about each
 person, the number of her children or other children in the household,
 details of any of her children not living in her household, and any
 changes in the household structure over the past year. Help-seeking in
 the past year includes whether the woman had sought medical care, had
 contacted the police, or had sought help from an agency or counselor,
 and whether she had an order of protection. Several variables reflect
 whether the woman left or tried to leave the relationship in the past
 year. Finally, the dataset includes summary variables about violent
 incidents in the past year (severity, recency, and frequency), and in
the follow-up period.

Tags: battered-women, communities, community-involvement, community-power, crime-prevention, domestic-violence, living-conditions, neighborhood-conditions, neighborhoods, neighbors, social-environment, social-networks
Organization: Department of Justice