Confirmatory Factor Analyses of Collective Efficacy and Police Satisfaction

• NCJ Number: 227551
• Journal: Journal of Crime and Justice Volume: 32 Issue: 1 Dated: 2009 Pages: 125-154
• Author(s): Gayle M. Rhineberger-Dunn; Susan M. Carlson
• Date Published: 2009
• Length: 30 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This study examined the dimensionality of two concepts with a confirmatory factor analysis, and then assessed how they were differentially impacted by neighborhood composition and structural conditions.

Abstract

Results of both confirmatory factor analyses provided evidence to support the theoretical claim of the importance of incorporating distinct measures of social cohesion, informal control, police citizen relations, and formal control in systemic social disorganization models. The two-dimensional confirmatory factor analysis models for both social cohesion-informal control and police relations-formal control provided a better fit then the uni-dimensional collective efficacy and police satisfaction models. Additionally, the hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) results show the importance of assessing the differential impact of neighborhood socio-demographic composition and structural conditions on social cohesion, informal control, police-citizen relations, and formal control. Conflating social cohesion and informal control obscures differences in how these variables are impacted by negative neighborhood structural conditions. Similarly, conflating police-citizen relations and formal control also obscures the differential impact of neighborhood structural condition on these variables. The findings related to the influence of racial and ethnic heterogeneity show that formal control model 3 is the only model in which racial heterogeneity is significant, indicating that the more racially diverse the neighborhood, the higher the level of formal control; when police-citizen relations are positive, racial heterogeneity has a positive impact on residents' perceptions of police officers' ability to do their job by maintaining order and preventing crime in the neighborhood. Data were collected from 343 neighborhood clusters and 8,562 cased analyzed by the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. Tables, notes, and references