Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2010, Sociology

The emergence of new Latino destination cities over the 1990s presents a host of unanswered questions about neighborhood violent crime rates. While past neighborhood crime studies have found little or no evidence of an association between Latino immigrant concentration and violent crime in multiple cities, contemporary studies of neighborhood violent crime do not consider how varying characteristics of cities in which neighborhoods are embedded have a bearing on immigrant composition and violent crime. The current project uses the Neighborhood Change Database and the National Neighborhood Crime Study to examine the relationship between Latino migration and neighborhood violent crime in cities that vary according to their histories with Latino migration. Using multilevel modeling techniques, this analysis demonstrates that the effects of social disorganization and Latino population characteristics on neighborhood violence are significantly influenced by city-level Latino population growth.

Committee: Ruth Peterson PhD (Advisor); Laurie Krivo PhD (Committee Member); Christopher Browning PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Criminology; Demographics; Hispanic Americans; Sociology