“SEEING” MINORITIES AND PERCEPTIONS OF DISORDER: EXPLICATING THE MEDIATING AND MODERATING MECHANISMS OF SOCIAL COHESION

• Author: JOHN R. HIPP,RENEE ZAHNOW,LORRAINE MAZEROLLE,REBECCA WICKES
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12011
• Date: 01 August 2013
• Published date: 01 August 2013

“SEEING” MINORITIES AND PERCEPTIONS

OF DISORDER: EXPLICATING THE

MEDIATING AND MODERATING

MECHANISMS OF SOCIAL COHESION∗

REBECCA WICKES

Institute of Social Science Research/School of Social Science

University of Queensland

JOHN R. HIPP

Criminology, Law and Society

University of California—Irvine

RENEE ZAHNOW

LORRAINE MAZEROLLE

Institute of Social Science Research/School of Social Science

University of Queensland

KEYWORDS: disorder, minorities, neighborhood, social cohesion

Research shows that residents report high levels of disorder in places

with greater concentrations of minorities even after controlling for objec-

tive indicators of crime or disorder. Less understood, however, are the

mechanisms that explain this relationship. Drawing on a survey of nearly

10,000 residents nested within 297 neighborhoods across two cities, we

use a multiple indicators–multiple causes model to examine the cues that

lead individuals to distort the presence of minorities in neighborhoods.

We then employ multilevel models to test whether these distortions in-

fluence perceptions of disorder. Furthermore, we assess whether living

∗Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this arti-

cle in the Wiley Online Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/

crim.2011.51.issue-3/issuetoc.

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (RO700002,

DP1093960, and DP1094589). The authors would like to thank the editors, in par-

ticular Eric Baumer, and the reviewers for their considered comments and sugges-

tions. The authors would also like to thank the Queensland Police Service (QPS)

and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security

(CEPS) for their support in the collection of these data. Direct correspondence

to Rebecca Wickes, University of Queensland, Brisbane, St. Lucia, Qld 4072,

Australia (e-mail: r.wickes@uq.edu.au).

C2013 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12011

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 51 Number 3 2013 519

520 WICKES ET AL.

in a socially cohesive neighborhood mediates and/or moderates the re-

lationship between “seeing” minorities and perceiving disorder. We find

that when residents overestimate the proportion of minorities living in

their neighborhood, perceptions of disorder are heightened. Yet social

cohesion moderates and partially mediates this relationship: Residents

living in socially cohesive neighborhoods not only report less disorder

than those living in less cohesive communities, but also they “see” fewer

minorities when compared with residents living in less socially cohesive

neighborhoods. These results suggest that social cohesion is an impor-

tant mechanism for explaining how residents internalize the presence of

minorities in their neighborhoods and how this then leads to perceived

neighborhood disorder.

More than 30 years ago, Wilson and Kelling (1982) introduced the

metaphor of “broken windows” to describe how signs of social and phys-

ical disorder can lead to subsequent escalations in more serious predatory

crime. From this perspective, the presence of disorder signals to potential

offenders that an area is vulnerable and triggers the exodus of residents

and businesses out of troubled neighborhoods (Skogan, 1990). As Skogan

(1990) argued, disorder is the starting point of a spiral of neighborhood

decline that reduces the capacity of remaining businesses and residents to

engage in informal regulation of their neighborhood (see also Steenbeek

and Hipp, 2011).

In criminology, studies of disorder are typically concerned with objective

social and physical neighborhood problems (Bursik and Grasmick, 1993;

Sampson and Raudenbush, 1999; Skogan, 1990; Taylor, 2001; Wilson and

Kelling, 1982), or what Sampson called the “tangible manifestations of dis-

order” (2009: 7). These manifestations include the presence of abandoned

buildings, graffiti, or disorderly public behavior. Although these problems

represent relatively low-level breaches of the law, Sampson and Rauden-

bush (1999) contended that they share a similar etiology with more seri-

ous crime. For example, perceived disorder, like violence more broadly, is

higher in neighborhoods characterized by concentrated disadvantage and

residential instability (Skogan, 1990; Steenbeek and Hipp, 2011; Taylor,

1995) and lower in areas where residents share common values and work

together to solve local problems (Markowitz et al., 2001; Sampson and

Raudenbush, 1999).

The minority composition of the neighborhood also is associated with

both perceived disorder and more serious crime (Franzini et al., 2007;

Hipp, 2007; Laurence, 2011; Letki, 2008; Mohan, Twigg, and Taylor, 2011;

Permentier, Bolt, and van Ham, 2011; Sampson and Raudenbush, 2004;

Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls, 1997; Taylor, Twigg, and Mohan, 2010).

Yet, what is interesting, and what forms the focus of this article, is that the

MINORITIES AND PERCEPTIONS OF DISORDER 521

relationship between the minority composition of a given area and resi-

dents’ perceptions of disorder is not reducible to objective measurements

of crime and disorder in the neighborhood. “Seeing” disorder is, at least in

part, influenced by enduring biases that associate particular minorities with

criminality (Sampson, 2009; Sampson and Raudenbush, 2004).

In previous research, racial or ethnic determinants of disorder have been

viewed as a linear function of the size of particular minority groups re-

siding in the neighborhood. That is, assessments of neighborhood disor-

der are higher in places with more minorities. Yet Chiricos, McEntire, and

Gertz (2001) argued that it is the perception of the neighborhood compo-

sition rather than the actual presence of minorities that matters most for

perceiving neighborhood problems. They contended that “the racial com-

position of a place can only be consequential for social control if human

actors situated in these social circumstances are aware of the racial compo-

sition, concerned about it and respond in ways that mobilize control initia-

tives” (Chiricos, McEntire, and Gertz, 2001: 323). This point suggests that

the minority composition of a neighborhood is only salient in places where

residents perceive a greater social distance between the majority and the

minority population.

This article tests directly the relationship between what people “see”

in terms of the minority presence in their neighborhood and their per-

ceptions of disorder. We examine whether residents’ perceptions of the

minority composition of their neighborhood distorts their perceptions

of disorder. Yet rather than relying solely on respondents’ estimates of

the neighborhood racial and ethnic composition (Chiricos, McEntire, and

Gertz, 2001; Pickett et al., 2012), we simultaneously consider multiple

measures that might be cues for the presence of racial and ethnic mi-

norities in a neighborhood and the respondents’ tendency to overesti-

mate or underestimate the neighborhood’s minority composition. Draw-

ing on the social distance literature (Hipp and Perrin, 2009; Mayhew

et al., 1995), we hypothesize that particular cues of racial or ethnic dif-

ference will lead some residents to overestimate a neighborhood’s mi-

nority composition and that these distorted, overestimated views will

lead to heightened perceptions of disorder. Additionally, and in line

with Chiricos, McEntire, and Gertz (2001: 323), we analyze the relation-

ship between neighborhood mechanisms that may reduce “social control

initiatives” and thus influence residents’ perceptions of disorder. Here,

we focus on social cohesion. Many studies have indicated that the mi-

nority composition of the neighborhood can attenuate social cohesion

(Alesina and La Ferrara, 2000, 2002; Costa and Khan, 2003; Gijsberts,

van der Meer, and Dagevos, 2011; Lancee and Dronkers, 2008; Stolle,

Soroka, and Johnston, 2008) and reduce informal social control (Sampson,

Raudenbush, and Earls, 1997; Steenbeek and Hipp, 2011). Thus, we