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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (19 results)

  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2015)
Whereas one line of recent neighborhood research has placed an emphasis on zooming into smaller units of analysis such as street blocks, another line of research has suggested that even the meso-area of neighborhoods is too narrow and that the area surrounding the neighborhood is also important. Thus, there is a need to examine the scale at which the social ecology impacts crime. We use data from seven cities from around the year 2000 to test our research questions using multilevel negative binomial regression models (N = 73,010 blocks and 8,231 block groups). Our results suggest that although many neighborhood factors seem to operate on the microscale of blocks, others seem to have a much broader impact. In addition, we find that racially and ethnically homogenous blocks within heterogeneous block groups have the most crime. Our findings also show the strongest results for a multitude of land-use measures and that these measures sharpen some of the associations from social characteristics. Thus, we find that accounting for multiple scales simultaneously is important in ecological studies of crime.
    Cover page: Close-Ups and the Scale of Ecology: Land Uses and the Geography of Social Context and Crime
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2018)
    Although neighborhood studies often focus on the presence of some particular entity and its consequences for a variety of local processes, a frequent limitation is the failure to account more broadly for the local context. This paper therefore examines the role of parks for community crime, but contributes to the literature by testing whether the context of land uses and demographics nearby parks moderate the parks and crime relationship. A key feature of our approach is that we also test how these characteristics explain crime in the park, nearby the park, and in other neighborhoods in the city with data from nine cities across the United States (N = 109,808 blocks). We use multilevel Poisson and negative binomial regressions to test our ideas for six types of street crime. Our findings show that nearby land uses and socio-demographic characteristics are a key driver of crime being located within the park or nearby the park. Our results also show a clear distance decay pattern for the impact of various land uses and socio-demographics nearby parks. The results emphasize a need for research to consider the broader socio-spatial context in which crime generators/inhibitors are embedded.
      Cover page: Parks as crime inhibitors or generators: Examining parks and the role of their nearby context
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2012)
      "This project studied the effect of immigrant in-mobility on the trajectory of socioeconomic change in neighborhoods. The authors suggest that immigrant inflows may impact neighborhoods due to the consequences of residential mobility and the extent to which these new residents differ from the current residents. The authors use Southern California over a nearly 50-year period (1960 to 2007) as a case study to explore the short- and long- term impact of these changes. The authors find no evidence that immigrant inflow has negative consequences for home values, unemployment, or vacancies over this long period of time. Instead, the authors find that a novel measure they develop—a general measure of social distance—is much better at explaining the change in the economic conditions of these neighborhoods. Tracts with higher levels of social distance experienced a larger increase in the vacancy rate over the decade. The effect of social distance on home values changed over the study period: whereas social distance decreased home values during the 1960s, this completely reversed into a positive effect by the 2000s."
        Cover page: Immigrants and social distance:  Examining the social consequences of immigration for Southern California neighborhoods over 50 years
        • Peer Reviewed
        UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2015)
          Cover page: Neighborhoods, Social Networks, and Crime
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2015)
          © 2015 American Society of Criminology. Whereas one line of recent neighborhood research has placed an emphasis on zooming into smaller units of analysis such as street blocks, another line of research has suggested that even the meso-area of neighborhoods is too narrow and that the area surrounding the neighborhood is also important. Thus, there is a need to examine the scale at which the social ecology impacts crime. We use data from seven cities from around the year 2000 to test our research questions using multilevel negative binomial regression models (N = 73,010 blocks and 8,231 block groups). Our results suggest that although many neighborhood factors seem to operate on the microscale of blocks, others seem to have a much broader impact. In addition, we find that racially and ethnically homogenous blocks within heterogeneous block groups have the most crime. Our findings also show the strongest results for a multitude of land-use measures and that these measures sharpen some of the associations from social characteristics. Thus, we find that accounting for multiple scales simultaneously is important in ecological studies of crime.
            Cover page: CLOSE‐UPS AND THE SCALE OF ECOLOGY: LAND USES AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF SOCIAL CONTEXT AND CRIME
            • Article
            • Peer Reviewed
            UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2013)

            Defining “neighborhoods” is a bedeviling challenge faced by all studies of neighborhood effects and ecological models of social processes.  Although scholars frequently lament the inadequacies of the various existing definitions of “neighborhood”, we argue that previous strategies relying on non-overlapping boundaries such as block groups and tracts are fundamentally flawed.  The approach taken here instead builds on insights of the mental mapping literature, the social networks literature, the daily activities pattern literature, and the travel to crime literature to propose a new definition of neighborhoods:  egohoods.  These egohoods are conceptualized as waves washing across the surface of cities, as opposed to independent units with non-overlapping boundaries.  This approach is illustrated using crime data from nine cities:  Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Los Angeles, Sacramento, St. Louis, and Tucson.  The results show that measures aggregated to our egohoods explain more of the variation in crime across the social environment than do models with measures aggregated to block groups or tracts.  Results also suggest that measuring inequality in egohoods provides dramatically stronger positive effects on crime rates than when using the non-overlapping boundary approach, highlighting the important new insights that can be obtained by utilizing our egohood approach.

              Cover page: Egohoods as waves washing across the city:  a new measure of “neighborhoods”
              • Article
              • Peer Reviewed
              UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2017)
              A well-known challenge to studies examining the distance of residential mobility patterns is that the estimates are often constrained to patterns only within a particular metro area or between metro areas. Thus, studies are unable to estimate the entire distance decay functional form. Using a unique data set on the distance of the most recent move for a large sample of households in twenty-three metropolitan areas in the United States over three waves, we flexibly estimate the distance decay function for the entire sample, as well as for a series of subpopulations based on key demographic information.
                Cover page: The Shape of Mobility: Measuring the Distance Decay Function of Household Mobility
                • Thesis
                • Peer Reviewed
                UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2014)

                Many disciplines frequently use residents' home neighborhoods as a proxy for their entire social lives, which ignores people's temporary spatial presence in other neighborhoods for activities such as work and school. While most research only uses information on where people sleep - their home residence, my dissertation investigates this gap in the literature by focusing on the daytime movements of residents and how different areas of the city are interrelated over the day. My dissertation examines the spatial travel patterns of people over time - what I refer to as the spatial footprint - and uses these emph{spatial footprints} to understand local crime patterns in 13 cities over the day, week, and season. By focusing on the distinct spaces of individuals' daily activities and their relevant social space over the day, I dynamically model the changing activity and availability for social control across time, examine issues that are often treated as statistical nuisances (e.g., selection effects) as theoretical processes, and explicitly investigate how the nearby area and the interdependencies between neighborhoods matter for crime. I also examine crime within and around different land uses, including residential, commercial, school, and industrial areas, as they are occupied (or unoccupied) throughout the day, week, and season.

                  Cover page: Geographic space and time: The consequences of the spatial footprint for neighborhood crime
                  • Article
                  • Peer Reviewed
                  UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2022)
                  Objectives: Few studies have examined the consequences of neighborhoods for job prospects for people on parole. Specifically, networks between neighborhoods in where people commute to work and their spatial distributions may provide insight into patterns of joblessness because they represent the economic structure between neighborhoods. We argue that the network of neighborhoods provides insight into the competition people on parole face in the labor market, their spatial mismatch from jobs, as well as their structural support. Methods: We use data from people on parole released in Texas from 2006 to 2010 and create a network between all census tracts in Texas based on commuting ties from home to work. We estimate a series of multilevel models examining how network structures are related to joblessness. Results: The findings indicate that the structural position of neighborhoods has consequences for people on parole’s joblessness. Higher outdegree, reflecting neighborhoods with more outgoing ties to other neighborhoods, was consistently associated with less joblessness, while higher indegree, reflecting neighborhoods with more incoming ties into the neighborhood, was associated with more joblessness, particularly for Black and Latino people on parole. There was also some evidence of differences depending on geographic scale. Conclusions: Structural neighborhood-to-neighborhood networks are another component to understanding joblessness while people are on parole. The most consistent support was shown for the competition and structural support mechanisms, rather than spatial mismatch.
                    Cover page: The Network of Neighborhoods and Geographic Space: Implications for Joblessness While on Parole
                    • Article
                    • Peer Reviewed
                    UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2018)
                    Whereas existing research typically treats variability in residents’ reports of collective efficacy and neighboring as measurement error, the authors consider such variability as of substantive interest in itself. This variability may indicate disagreement among residents with implications for the neighborhood collectivity. The authors propose using a general measure of social distance based on several social dimensions (rather than measures based on a single dimension such as racial/ethnic heterogeneity or income inequality) to help understand this variability in assessments. The authors use data from wave I (2001) of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (n = 3,570) to aggregate respondents into egohoods of two different sizes: quarter-mile and half-mile radii. Consistent with expectations, neighborhoods with higher levels of general social distance have higher variability in reports of neighboring and the two components of collective efficacy, cohesion and informal social control.
                      Cover page: Disagreement in Assessing Neighboring and Collective Efficacy: The Role of Social DistanceCreative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
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