DOI: 10.3886/icpsr03437
title: Community Crime Prevention and Intimate Violence in Chicago, 1995-1998
title: Archival Version

description: 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.
description: Intimate violence is seldom a single event, but
 rather a continuing relationship punctuated by verbal and physical
 abuse. Empirical evidence indicates that previous violent events
 cumulate to determine the development of each succeeding event, though
 escalation is not inevitable. Efforts at prevention or intervention,
 if they are to be effective, must take into account not just one event
 or circumstance, but also the pattern of repetition. These violent
 events take place at a location. That location lies within a
 neighborhood context. Research has suggested that a neighborhood's
 collective efficacy and capacity to solve problems are linked to
 neighborhood violence. Collective efficacy and community capacity are
 each a "social good" -- a resource for the entire neighborhood,
 derived from the social interaction of neighborhood
 residents. Community capacity to solve problems includes collective
 efficacy as well as social resources that result from neighborhood
 organizations and the neighborhood's clout in the city. There are many
 avenues through which a woman's neighborhood can provide resources and
 support for help-seeking and the reduction of violence. They include,
 but go beyond, the physical availability and cultural accessibility of
 nearby support services. Intervention from a public health, public
 safety, or helping agency may not be sufficient or even necessary for
 a woman to escape a dangerous situation. Formal interventions occur in
 a context of interventions initiated by the woman herself with the
 support of natural helping networks. Research indicates that an abused
 woman's ability to mobilize social control effectively is an
 interactive process related to her resources and individual situation,
 as well as to the availability of services. Therefore, support from
 informal social networks may be as vital as support from formal
 community services. The vast majority of research on collective
 efficacy and violence has focused on street crime, not on violence
 committed within the family. The few studies that exist suggest that,
 when a neighborhood enjoys greater collective efficacy, the
 violence-reduction benefits may accrue not only to those who are
 victimized on the street or in public places, but also to those who
 are victimized behind closed doors. However, because of methodological
 limitations in those studies, it is difficult to examine the processes
 underlying the association. To study the effect of the neighborhood
 context on an abused woman's ability to escape further violence, it is
 necessary to follow the experiences of individual abused women over
 time. Though many agree that analysis of the contextual effect of the
 community on an abused woman's help-seeking and on violence reduction
 is sorely needed, such an analysis is not simple. It requires
 longitudinal data on women being physically abused by an intimate
 partner, and data on the efficacy and capacity of the neighborhoods
 where each woman lives. Together, the Chicago Women's Health Risk
 Study (CWHRS) and the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS)
 evaluation can provide this information. 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).
description: This study linked two unique Chicago datasets, (1)
 the CHICAGO WOMEN'S HEALTH RISK STUDY (CWHRS) (ICPSR 3002) and (2) the
 Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) evaluation. The CWHRS was
 designed to give nurses, beat officers, and other primary support
 people information they need in order to help women experiencing
 violence at the hands of an intimate partner to lower their risk of
 life-threatening injury or death. The CWHRS was designed around the
 comparison of a sample of all intimate partner homicides involving a
 woman aged 18 or older that occurred in Chicago over a two-year
 period, and a clinic/hospital sample of detailed, longitudinal
 interviews with women sampled as they came into hospitals and clinics
 in Chicago neighborhoods in which the risk for intimate partner
 violence was high. The purpose of the CAPS evaluation was to evaluate
 the long-term organizational transition of the Chicago Police
 Department (CPD) to a community policing model. CAPS is an ambitious
 plan to reorganize the CPD, restructure its management, redefine its
 mission, and forge a new relationship between police and city
 residents. From its inception, the CAPS evaluation included important
 geographic components. Information from a number of sources, including
 the Census, police reports, traffic, schools, and housing, was
 geocoded into area boundaries that were consistently maintained
 throughout the evaluation period, and the datasets collected by the
 evaluation were also geocoded into the same boundaries. The CAPS
 evaluation conducted citywide random-digit dialing surveys of city
 residents in English or Spanish. Because the residential address of
 each CAPS survey respondent could be geocoded, CAPS survey data were
 available for almost all larger areas (such as Chicago community areas
 or police districts) and for many smaller areas (such as police
 beats). From the CWHRS study, researchers used only the
 clinic/hospital sample. From the CAPS evaluation, researchers used (1)
 the geographic database including Census data, crime indicators,
 neighborhood disorder, and voter turnout, and (2) neighborhood
 collective efficacy and community capacity data from the citywide
 surveys that the CAPS evaluation conducted annually from 1995 to
 1998. The CAPS evaluation surveys also were the source for three of
 the four community context indicators used in the combined dataset --
 informal social control, organizational involvement, and station
 protest (one of the two downtown connections indicators). The second
 downtown connections indicator, voter turnout, is from the CAPS
 geographic database. The unit of analysis for the combined dataset 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. Although there may be similarities among women
 living in the same neighborhood or in neighborhoods with similar
 community contexts, each woman responds to her context in a unique
 way, depending on her individual situation. To link each woman to the
 community where she was living at the time of the initial CWHRS
 interview, researchers geocoded her residential address (determined
 its longitude and latitude) at the initial interview. It was then
 possible to overlay the woman's geocoded address on a Chicago map
 showing various area boundaries, such as Chicago community areas,
 census tracts, census block groups, Chicago police districts, and
 Chicago police beats. Researchers were therefore able to determine the
 area in which each woman was living at the time of the initial CWHRS
 interview. Researchers evaluated a large variety of alternative area
 definitions for residential neighborhood and chose the police beat as
 the best, because it is the smallest Chicago area for which the most
 reliable and complete data are available. The characteristics of the
woman's police beat then became the community context for each woman.
description: Demographic variables include the race, ethnicity,
 age, marital status, income, and level of education of the woman and
 the abuser. The beat, district, and community area of the woman's
 address are present. Neighborhood-level variables (for police beats)
 include voter turnout percentage, organizational involvement,
 percentage of households on public aid, percentage of housing that was
 vacant, percentage of owned units, percentage of feminine poverty
 households, assault rate, and drug crimes rate. Individual-level
 variables include the Social Support Network (SSN) scale, language the
 interview was conducted in, Harass scale score, Power and Control
 score, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) diagnosis, and other data
 pertaining to the woman's emotional and physical health. 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.
description: Response Rates: Not applicable
description: Presence of Common Scales: Several Likert-type scales were used as well as the
 Medical Outcomes Study (MOS) scale of depression (Hayes et al., 1995,
 Stewart et al., 1988), the Power and Control scale (Johnson, 1996),
 the HARASS scale of stalking and harassment (Sheridan, 1998), a
 modified version of the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) (Johnson, 1996),
 the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Symptom Scale (Foa et al.,
 1993), the Campbell Danger Assessment (Campbell, 1993), and the Social
Support Network (SSN) scale (Block et al., 2000).
description: Convenience sampling.
description: Datasets: 
DS1: Community Crime Prevention and Intimate Violence in Chicago, 1995-1998
description: Abused women aged 18 or older living in Chicago,
Illinois.
description: (1) The data providing the community context taken
 from the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) evaluation are
 contained in the ICPSR study, LONGITUDINAL EVALUATION OF CHICAGO'S
 COMMUNITY POLICING PROGRAM, 1993-2000 (ICPSR 3335). Users should refer
 to the original study for the data collection instruments. (2) The
 data from the personal interviews with abused women are contained in
 the ICPSR study, CHICAGO WOMEN'S HEALTH RISK STUDY, 1995-1998 (ICPSR
 3002). Users should refer to the original study for the data
 collection instruments. The National Archive of Criminal Justice Data
 has created an online Resource Guide for the CHICAGO WOMEN'S HEALTH
 RISK STUDY, 1995-1998 (ICPSR 3002) in order to provide important
 information about the complexities of the data collection. Users are
 strongly encouraged to carefully review the information in the
 Resource Guide before referring to the Chicago Women's Health Risk
 Study. The Resource Guide is available at 
 
 http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/NACJD/HELP/faq3002.html. (3) The user
 guide and codebook are provided by ICPSR as Portable Document Format
 (PDF) file. The PDF file format was developed by Adobe Systems
 Incorporated and can be accessed using PDF reader software, such as
 the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Information on how to obtain a copy of the
Acrobat Reader is provided on the ICPSR Web site.