Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2017, Social Welfare

Neighborhood disorder is a social welfare issue that is associated with multiple negative outcomes for individuals including increased substance use, increased exposure to violence and crime, and mental health challenges. Collective efficacy is a widely studied predictor of positive community-level outcomes including lower levels of neighborhood disorder. However, relatively few community interventions based on collective efficacy have been developed. Further, studies evaluating interventions based on collective efficacy have reported mixed findings. A possible reason for the difficulty of operationalizing collective efficacy may be our current conceptualization of collective efficacy. The current understanding of collective efficacy views the concept as a combination of social cohesion and informal social control. However, recent research suggests that social cohesion and informal social control are unique constructs that are best conceptualized and measured separately. Further, research suggests that there may be factors that mediate the relationship between social cohesion and informal social control. This dissertation seeks to advance our understanding of collective efficacy in order to increase its utility for social work practice. A key component of collective efficacy is a community's shared belief that collective action will be successful. Although this belief has been discussed conceptually, it has yet to be measured in collective efficacy research. To address this limitation, I develop a concept called, “Mutual efficacy,” which is defined as, “community members' beliefs that collective action will be successful at attaining group goals.” This dissertation utilizes data from the Seattle Neighborhood and Crime Survey (SNCS) to explore mutual efficacy's role as a mediator between social cohesion and informal social control. The SNCS is a survey of 3,365 residents in Seattle, Washington. The factor structure of social cohesion, mutual efficac (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mark Joseph (Committee Chair); Claudia Coulton (Committee Member); Mark Singer (Committee Member); Darcy Freedman (Committee Member) Subjects: Social Psychology; Social Research; Social Work; Sociology

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, 2014, Sociology

This dissertation addresses the practice of informal social control in neighborhood settings by integrating extant theory with constructs from outside the mainstream of criminology. Empirical support comes from an ethnographic project conducted over a period of five years in an urban neighborhood setting. Detailed knowledge of this local context is used to frame informal social control as produced and enacted by residents in ways that both reflect and create the larger neighborhood social and cultural dynamics. Specifically, three ethnographic accounts are offered as separate papers to provide different lenses on the neighborhood dynamics. Each account can also be read as demonstrating the variability of ethnographic methodology. Taken together, these empirical papers not only report findings, but also illustrate various aspects of the unfolding process of constructivist grounded theory-building. For example, the first paper highlights how a serendipitous finding gave shape to further data analysis, illustrating the nature of “emergent” findings in grounded theory analysis. The second paper reports findings from more advanced stages of analysis and demonstrates the preliminary stages of theory construction. Finally, the last paper emphasizes the reflexive nature of ethnographic (re)presentation by presenting “findings” in the form of an evocative autoethnography. The dissertation contributes to the criminology scholarship by introducing theoretical constructs that have heretofore not been connected directly to practices of informal social control. Moreover, this dissertation is also a statement in support of the integration of more “first-person ethnography” (Venkatesh 2013) into the core of criminology. Future work will continue to build on current scholarship to provide a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between individuals and communities.

Committee: Kathryn Feltey Dr. (Advisor); Matthew Lee Dr. (Committee Member); William Lyons Dr. (Committee Member); Tiffany Taylor Dr. (Committee Member); Brent Teasdale Dr. (Committee Member); John Zipp Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Criminology; Sociology