Communities, Crime, and Reactions to Crime Multilevel Models: Accomplishments and Meta-Challenges

Of interest here are theories about the impacts of both community and individual features on individual-level outcomes like victimization, reactions to crime like fear or avoidance, or related perceptions of features of local context such as perceived risk. Relevant community features could be almost anything, depending on the theory: demographic structural dimensions, land use features, reported crime rates, removal or return rates, or features of local social, cultural or political climate. Communities are areas where people live which are smaller than cities and larger than individual address parcels or land uses (Hunter 1979). Spatial communities exist at multiple levels, such as streetblocks within neighborhoods. (Taylor 1997). Crime refers to reported crime rates and self-reported victimization. Reactions to crime include concerns for personal safety such as fear of crime and worries for personal property, and more cognitively-weighted reactions such as perceptions of risk or assessments of crime severities in the locale (Dubow et al. 1979). A modified Boudon-Coleman “boat” diagram can be used as a metamodel for organizing our understanding of the types of links in theories about crime impacts or reactions to crime. See Fig. 1 (Boudon 1986: 29–31; Bunge 2006; Coleman 1990: 10). Although community attributes and changes are conditioned by broader societal and geographic factors such as de-industrialization (Kasarda 1992; Lane 1997) and suburban expansion (Marshall 1979) for example, the primary conceptual focus is on community-level features and individual-level features and dynamics. The Boudon-Coleman metamodel suggests two links are operative when individual-level outcomes are of interest: context effects of community features (macro-level inputs) on individual attributes (micro-level inputs) (Ma-I → Mi-I), and impacts of individual-level attributes on individual-level outcomes (micro-level outputs) (Mi-I → Mi-O). Of course, if spatially aggregated outcomes are of interest then the final link between individual-level outcomes and community-level outcomes (macro-level outcomes) (Mi-O → Ma-O) becomes relevant as well. This perspective assumes methodological individualism—the behaviors of individuals are key building blocks for social change—but is not tautological when considering aggregated outcomes (Boudon 1986: 53). Open image in new window Fig. 1 Meta-model orientation to crime, people, and places In such a theoretical frame the macro-to-micro and micro-to-macro links hold considerable theoretical interest (Liska 1990). The first tells us about how context shapes individual-level dynamics. The second tells us how agency operates. Methodological individualism is avoided when interpreting the second link since local social processes such as norm formation also shape such dynamics (Boudon 1986: 53; Coleman 1990: 22, 30, 265, 273,599). Even if attention is limited to aggregated individual actions without the concept of interdependencies, non-intuitive collective outcomes can arise (Boudon 1986: 57). The most central idea in this metatheoretical approach, given the current focus, is as follows: although ecological relationships between macro-level inputs and macro-level outputs can be modeled, understanding such macro-level dynamics (Ma-I → Ma-O) hinges on gaining insight into the constituent links in the chain: Ma-I → Mi-I → Mi-O → Ma-O. The ecological connection depends on the underlying macro → micro → micro → macro processes.