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Sources Of Informal Social Control And The Relationship To Victimization In Southeastern Virginia, Jennifer R. Jones Oct 2009

Sources Of Informal Social Control And The Relationship To Victimization In Southeastern Virginia, Jennifer R. Jones

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

The link between community characteristics and crime has been at the forefront of criminological research for some time. Social disorganization theory focuses on the relationship between structural characteristics of communities and crime. Recent examination of the social disorganization perspective has emphasized the role of informal social control as mediating the effects of structural characteristics on victimization. In this study, contemporary social disorganization theory was tested using data from the U.S. Census Bureau: Census Tract Fact Finder (2000) and the Southeastern Virginia Community Survey (2008). This research addressed three central research questions: Is there a relationship between structural characteristics (i.e., poverty, …


Bond To Society, Collectivism, And Conformity: A Comparative Study Of Japanese And American College Students., Miyuki Fukushima, Susan F. Sharp, Emiko Kobayashi Jul 2009

Bond To Society, Collectivism, And Conformity: A Comparative Study Of Japanese And American College Students., Miyuki Fukushima, Susan F. Sharp, Emiko Kobayashi

Sociology & Criminology Faculty Publications

An argument is developed that the purported collectivism in Japanese society generates stronger social bonds in Japan than in the more individualistic United States, which might then explain the lower level of deviance often found in Japan. We test this using survey data from samples of Japanese and American college students on measures of deviance and social bonds. Results indicate that Japanese students engage in significantly less deviance than Americans, and although variables from Hirschi's (1969) social control theory behave similarly across cultures as predictors of deviance, the theory failed to account for the lower level of deviance among Japanese.