Michael S. Barton

Impulsivity, School Context, and School Misconduct

Impulsivity holds a central place in the explanations of adolescent delinquency. Recent research suggests that neighborhood characteristics, particularly SES (socioeconomic status), perceived supervision, and collective efficacy, moderate the association between impulsivity and delinquency. However, findings to date have been equivocal, and the relationships between social context, impulsivity, and delinquency remain an open question. This study builds on the current literature by examining the moderating influence of a second context, the high school, on the relationship between impulsivity and delinquency. The authors focus explicitly on self-reported delinquency that has occurred on school grounds, referred to here as school misconduct. Results of hierarchical logistic regression models using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health suggest that the relationship between impulsivity and two measures of misconduct vary significantly across schools. Moreover, the relationship between impulsivity and weapon carrying is stronger in schools characterized by a limited sense of connectedness among students.

An exploration of the importance of the strategy used to identify gentrification

Urban scholars have described the importance of gentrification in major cities across the USA since the 1970s. While there is consensus that gentrification shaped social and physical aspects of neighbourhoods, scholars have yet to agree on how gentrified neighbourhoods should be identified. Owing to the lack of consensus, gentrification was measured in a variety of ways, which greatly influenced the neighbourhoods studied in previous research and potentially the findings of research that assessed the importance of gentrification for other neighbourhood outcomes. The current study contributes to this debate by applying and comparing two census-based strategies for identifying gentrified neighbourhoods with a qualitative neighbourhood selection strategy derived from The New York Times to New York City neighbourhoods for the span of years from 1980 to 2009. Results confirm that each of the strategies identified different neighbourhoods and that qualitative strategies for identifying gentrified neighbourhoods may overlook areas that experienced similar changes to those more widely recognised as gentrified. Given these findings, additional analyses assessed which census-based neighbourhood selection strategy better represented the neighbourhoods perceived by The New York Times, a major media outlet that shaped discourse on gentrification in the USA, as having experienced gentrification.

The Association of Minority Self-Rated Health with Black versus White Gentrification.

There exists controversy as to the impact gentrification of cities has on the well-being of minorities. Some accuse gentrification of causing health disparities for disadvantaged minority populations residing in neighborhoods that are changing as a result of these socioeconomic shifts. Past scholarship has suggested that fears of displacement and social isolation associated with gentrification lead to poorer minority health. However, there is a lack of research that directly links gentrification to minority health outcomes. We address this gap with individual data from the 2008 Philadelphia Health Management Corporation’s Southeastern Pennsylvania Household Health Survey and census tract data from the 2000 Decennial Census and the 2006–2010 American Community Survey. We implement logistic multilevel models to determine whether and how a resident’s self-rated health is affected by gentrification of their neighborhoods. We find that while gentrification does have a marginal effect improving self-rated health for neighborhood residents overall, it leads to worse health outcomes for Blacks. Accounting for racial change, while gentrification leading to increases in White population has no measurable effect on minority health, “Black gentrification” leads to marginally worse health outcomes for Black respondents. These results demonstrate the limitations that improvements of neighborhood socioeconomic character have in offsetting minority health disparities.

A stop too far: How does public transportation concentration influence neighbourhood median household income?

Research on US cities has connected the concentration of public transit with various neighbourhood outcomes, but it remains unclear whether public transit was more attractive to lower or higher income households. Some research found neighbourhoods with public transportation were more attractive to lower income households, likely because such households could not afford private transportation. Closer examination suggested that the type of transit was important, as lower income households were more likely to use buses while higher income households were more likely to use rapid transit. A key limitation of existing research on transit and neighbourhood household income was that it did not adequately control for variation over time. The current study addresses this limitation by assessing how the concentration of subway and bus stops predicted variation in median household income in New York City during the 2000s. Results of cross-sectional regressions partially confirm the findings of previous research that lower income households corresponded to areas characterised by higher concentrations of bus stops. Longitudinal results, however, indicate that the concentration of different forms of transit was uniquely associated with changes in neighbourhood median household income, independent of other neighbourhood changes.

Gentrification and Violent Crime in New York City

Research has frequently referenced the influence of gentrification on crime, but only a few studies empirically assessed this relationship. Recent research has utilized innovative measures of gentrification and advanced statistical techniques, but many questions remain unanswered. One such question is whether and to what extent gentrification influenced crime in New York City. The current study used a quantitative operationalization of gentrification that was grounded in qualitative information and hybrid fixed-effects regression to assess whether changes in violent crime rates in New York City were associated with gentrification. Results indicate that sub-boroughs that experienced greater rates of gentrification featured significantly larger declines in assault, homicide, and robbery and that this relationship did not vary significantly over time.

Barriocide: Investigating the Temporal and Spatial Influence of Neighborhood Structural Characteristics on Gang and Non-Gang Homicides in East Los Angeles:

This study explored how changes in neighborhood structural characteristics predicted variation in gang versus non-gang homicides in a policing division of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Longitudinal negative binomial models were examined to test the relationship between-neighborhood structural covariates with gang and non-gang homicides over a 35-year period. This study highlights the potential to estimate temporal effects not captured by cross-sectional analyses alone. The results underscore a unique feature that distinguishes gang homicides from other forms of non-gang violence, its tenacious clustering, and spatial dependence over time.

A Theoretical Explanation of the Influence of Gentrification on Neighborhood Crime

ABSTRACT Gentrification and other types of neighborhood revitalization strategies have been promoted as viable crime reduction strategies, but empirical assessments of this relationship produced inconsistent results. The mixed results were partly due to a narrow theoretical focus on social disorganization and routine activities, but also because of a limited conceptualization of gentrification. The current study draws on gentrification literature more broadly and incorporates insights from additional criminological theories to provide a more complete understanding of how gentrification is related to neighborhood crime. Specifically, three pathways through which gentrification influences neighborhood crime are identified.

The George Wilson Effect: Does Intergenerational Closure and Collective Efficacy Reduce Juvenile Delinquency in a Neighborhood?

ABSTRACT A substantial amount of research found crime and delinquency to be lower in areas with stronger neighborhood communities, but the casual mechanism behind this association remains debated. The current study contributes to this debate by examining the association of two forms of social capital with rates of delinquency. The first, collective efficacy, has been widely studied, while the second, intergenerational closure has not. While the results support previous research indicating the primary role of collective efficacy as a proactive factor against delinquency, results for intergenerational closure suggest the influence of neighborhood community on delinquency does not always result in lower delinquency.

An Investigation of the Influence of the Spatial Distribution of Neighborhood Violent Crime on Fear of Crime

Although crime rates dramatically declined during the 1990s, recent statistics indicated more than one third of the U.S. population continued to be afraid of areas within one mile of their home. Statistics such as this imply spatial dependence, but the importance of space in statistical analyses of fear of crime has remained relatively underexplored. The current study contributes to research on fear of crime by assessing the importance of crime rates in nearby neighborhood areas in addition to conventional individual- and neighborhood-level predictors of fear of criminal victimization. Results indicate that individuals who lived near neighborhoods that featured higher rates of violent crime were more likely to report being afraid of violent crime, but that the influence of violent crime rates in nearby neighborhoods was lessened after other features of their home neighborhood were controlled. In particular, the results highlight the importance of neighborhood communities as a protective factor against fear of crime.