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Social Disorganization, Disorder, Social Cohesion, Informal Controls, And Crime: A Reformulation And Test Of Systemic Social Disorganization Theory, Gayle M. Rhineberger

Dissertations

The primary purpose of this dissertation is to modify and test the systemic social disorganization models of crime proposed by Bursik and Grasmick (1993) and Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls (1997), and offer an empirical test of my hypothesized model. Specifically, the model includes traditional indicators of social disorganization (racial/ethnic heterogeneity, socioeconomic status, family disruption, residential stability) as exogenous variables; social and physical disorder, social cohesion, and three levels of informal social control (private, parochial, and public) as intervening mechanisms; and official crime counts and crime victimization as dependent variables.

The data used in this study come from the Project on …