DOI: 10.3886/icpsr03412.v1
title: Informal Social Control of Crime in High Drug Use Neighborhoods in Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky, 2000
title: Version 1

description: This neighborhood-level study sought to explore the effect
 of cultural disorganization, in terms of both weakened conventional
 culture and value heterogeneity, on informal social control, and the
 extent to which these effects may be conditioned by the level of drug
 use in the neighborhood. Data for Part 1 were collected from
 face-to-face and telephone interviews with households in the targeted
 sample. Part 2 is comprised of data collected from the United States
 Census 1990 Summary Tape File 3A (STF3A) as well as the United
 States Census 2000 Population counts, Lexington and Louisville police
 crime incident reports, and police data on drug arrests. The responses
 gleaned from the survey used in Part 1 were aggregated to the census
block group level, which are included in Part 2.
description: Understanding the community context in which
 behaviors occur is viewed as critical in predicting a wide variety of
 social problems for an increasing number of disciplines. While
 sociology and public health disciplines have a long tradition of
 understanding the ecological context of social problems, other
 disciplines are just beginning to move toward more ecological
 approaches. Within criminology, this trend of context-sensitivity has
 produced a literature that has become increasingly concerned with
 understanding the processes or mechanisms through which community
 characteristics affect crime rates. The most common community-level
 approach to understanding crime has been within a social
 disorganization framework. However, empirical examinations of this
 model have generally only examined aspects of structural
 disorganization, ignoring what has been referred to as cultural
 disorganization. The idea of cultural disorganization focuses on the
 extent to which culture has become weakened and can no longer provide
 the basis for social control. Social ties among community members are
 viewed as an essential mediating characteristic between the community
 structure and the informal social control of crime. Social ties are
 the foundation for informal social control as they provide the
 mechanism through which articulation of shared values occurs and
 support for enforcing those values is generated within communities.
 Communities with wider friendship and associational ties have been
 argued to have a greater potential for informal social control. This
 neighborhood-level study sought to explore the effect of cultural
 disorganization, in terms of both weakened conventional culture and
 value heterogeneity, on informal social control, and the extent to
 which these effects may be conditioned by the level of drug use in the
neighborhood.
description: Because many of the issues of values and norms
 seemed particularly relevant to neighborhoods in which drugs were
 heavily used and in which a drug culture may have developed,
 researchers wanted to intentionally include neighborhoods known to be
 home to high levels of drug activity. While there has been much
 discussion on how to best define neighborhoods geographically, most
 community-level crime studies have used relatively large boundaries
 such as census tracts, political wards, municipally defined
 neighborhoods, or police beats. These "neighborhoods," however, are
 generally quite large, comprised of several thousand residents. The
 census block group was chosen to define neighborhoods for this
 study. Approximately 60 neighborhoods were used in this study. Data
 for Part 1 were collected from face-to-face and telephone interviews
 with households in the targeted sample (on average, 35 households per
 census block group/neighborhood). Part 2 is comprised of data
 collected from the United States Census 1990 Summary Tape File 3A
 (STF3A) as well as the United States Census 2000 Population counts,
 Lexington and Louisville police crime incident reports, and police
 data on drug arrests. The responses gleaned from the survey used in
 Part 1 were aggregated to the census block group level, which are
 included in Part 2. Each sampled household was mailed a letter
 explaining the purpose of the study and stating that the household
 might be contacted to participate in the study. The letter further
 informed recipients that participation in the study was voluntary and
 completely confidential, and that survey respondents would be paid 15
 dollars for participating in the survey, which would last
 approximately 20-25 minutes. Cover letters were mailed to sampled
 households in Louisville on February 10, February 16, February 22, and
 February 25, 2000, and to households in Lexington on April 1, April 5,
 and April 10, 2000. The mailing of the letters was staggered in order
 to assure that each household would receive the letter only days
 before interviewers would contact them. At this point households with
 phones were separated from the households without phones. The "with
 phones" sample was then turned over to the University of Kentucky
 Survey Research Center, which conducted the telephone interviews.
 Households without phones were interviewed face-to-face by members of
 the research team. Telephone interviews were conducted between
 February 16, 2000, and June 11, 2000. All telephone interviews began
 with a confirmation of the respondent's address, so that researchers
 were certain to interview only persons at the sampled addresses.
 Interviewers were instructed to speak with the person in the household
 who had most recently had a birthday and who was at least 18 years of
 age. Disconnected numbers were tried again two weeks later in order to
 attempt to capture temporary disconnects. If those numbers were still
 disconnected, they became eligible to be included in the "no-phone"
 list. At least 20 attempts, and in some neighborhoods as many as 30
 attempts, were made to contact a household member at the listed phone
 number. Even though researchers used the most recent city-wide
 directories, many of the sampled households were vacant or researchers
 had a telephone number that was no longer in service or no longer
 associated with the sampled address. Therefore, in some neighborhoods
 it was necessary to draw a second random sample in order to achieve
 the desired 35 respondents/households per neighborhood. Households
 without telephones, or with disconnected numbers, were interviewed
 using face-to-face interviews. Interviewers were trained by the
 research team and included both males and females, and African
 Americans and Caucasians. Face-to-face interviewers attempted to make
 contact at each address five times. Approximately 75 percent of the
 completed surveys were conducted over the phone and 25 percent were
 conducted in person. Two neighborhoods were eventually dropped from
 the study. One neighborhood in the medical area of Louisville had only
 a small number of respondents and another neighborhood consisting of
 elderly housing had a low response rate. For Part 2, police data for
 each of the two study cities were also collected. Researchers
 collected police incident reports for 1997, 1998, and 1999, as well as
 drug arrest data for 1999. All police data were geocoded using
 ArcView. After geocoding, lists of incidents were printed for each
 neighborhood. These lists were verified by a research assistant, who
 checked addresses on all boundary streets to be sure only those
 addresses on the included side of the street (odd versus even) were
 counted. Further, incidents that occurred in the intersection of
 boundary streets were treated in two ways. Because these incidents
 could be counted in as many as four different neighborhoods (for
 example, if the intersection was a boundary on the southeast corner of
 neighborhood A, the southwest corner of neighborhood B, the northeast
 corner of neighborhood C, and the northwest corner of neighborhood D),
 researchers counted them in each neighborhood in which they were
 included (total counts) and randomly assigned them to one of the
neighborhoods in which they could have been included (random counts).
description: Data for Part 1 include respondents' answers to
 questions about their interaction with their neighbors such as how
 often they borrowed or exchanged things with their neighbors, how
 often they invited neighbors over for a meal, to play cards, or to
 talk, how often they discussed their children, neighborhood children,
 or church with their neighbors, how often they went out with their
 neighbors to dinner or to a sporting event, and how often they
 disagreed with their neighbors. Respondents were also asked about the
 number of times within the last six months certain crimes took place
 in their neighborhood such as fights involving or not involving a
 weapon, sexual assault or rape, robbery, or muggings, and whether any
 member of their household was a victim of any of these crimes. Whether
 any of the following events ever occurred in the neighborhood was
 reported by the respondents, as well as if the respondent called the
 police to report these events: people using drugs, noisy parties, loud
 arguments, broken street lights, abandoned cars, and people drinking
 or buying and selling drugs. Respondents also provided their opinion
 about the importance of education, drug use, trusting neighbors,
 living by a value system, spousal abuse, and the police and their
 interaction with the neighborhood. Demographic variables include the
 gender, age, race, and marital status for each respondent. For Part 2,
 variables that were used in Part 1 were aggregated up so that they
 represented a "neighborhood" or census block group as opposed to an
 individual household. Additional variables for Part 2 include the 1990
 Census population totals for specific age groups (e.g., total persons
 aged 22 to 24), ratio of income to poverty taken from the 1990 Census,
 and homicides, rapes, assaults, robberies, burglaries, and auto thefts
from 1997, 1998, and 1999, taken from police reports.
description: Response Rates: For Part 1, the overall cooperation rate was 60
percent.
description: Presence of Common Scales: Several Likert-type scales were used.
description: The sample for this study consists of 66 block groups in
 two urban communities in Kentucky. The sampling plan was developed to
 assure a sufficient number of high drug use neighborhoods and to
 assure an adequate distribution of predominantly white, predominantly
 racially mixed, and predominantly minority neighborhoods. To achieve
 these goals, a non-proportional stratified sampling of block groups
 was used. Once block groups were sampled, all street segments within
 those block groups were identified. Using the "street section" of
 city-wide directories, all addresses on these street segments were
 then identified, and a sample of approximately 60 households from each
 block group was selected using systematic random sampling. Since the
 cross-reference directory distinguished between residences and
businesses, only residences were included in the sampling frames.
description: Datasets: 
DS0: Study-Level Files
DS1: Survey Data
DS2: Aggregate Data
description: Census block groups in two urban cities located in
 Kentucky and individuals, representing households, from within the
block groups. Smallest Geographic Unit: census block group
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