SPATIAL DIMENSIONS OF THE EFFECT OF NEIGHBORHOOD DISADVANTAGE ON DELINQUENCY*

• Author: SCOTT J. SOUTH,MATT VOGEL
• Published date: 01 August 2016
• Date: 01 August 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12110

SPATIAL DIMENSIONS OF THE EFFECT OF

NEIGHBORHOOD DISADVANTAGE ON

DELINQUENCY∗

MATT VOGEL1and SCOTT J. SOUTH2

1Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri—St.

Louis

2Department of Sociology, University at Albany, SUNY

KEYWORDS: neighborhood disadvantage, spatial processes, delinquency

Research examining the relationship between neighborhood socioeconomic disad-

vantage and adolescent offending typically examines only the influence of residential

neighborhoods. This strategy may be problematic as 1) neighborhoods are rarely spa-

tially independent of each other and 2) adolescents spend an appreciable portion of

their time engaged in activities outside of their immediate neighborhood. Therefore,

characteristics of neighborhoods outside of, but geographically proximate to, resi-

dential neighborhoods may affect adolescents’ propensity to engage in delinquent be-

havior. We append a spatially lagged, distance-weighted measure of socioeconomic

disadvantage in “extralocal” neighborhoods to the individual records of respondents

participating in the first two waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997

Cohort (N=6,491). Results from negative binomial regression analyses indicate that

the level of socioeconomic disadvantage in extralocal neighborhoods is inversely as-

sociated with youth offending, as theories of relative deprivation, structured opportu-

nity, and routine activities would predict, and that the magnitude of this effect rivals

that of the level of disadvantage in youths’ own residential neighborhoods. Moreover,

socioeconomic disadvantage in extralocal neighborhoods suppresses the criminogenic

influence of socioeconomic disadvantage in youths’ own neighborhoods, revealing

stronger effects of local neighborhood disadvantage than would otherwise be observed.

∗Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the Wiley Online

Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2016.54.issue-3/issuetoc.

We are grateful to T. J. Taylor and Rick Rosenfeld for insightful comments on earlier drafts of this

article. We are indebted to Timothy McCuddy and Chris McDaniel for their assistance in various

aspects of this project. We would like to extend a special thanks to Jennifer Cassidy-Gilbert at the

Bureau of Labor Statistics for her invaluable assistance in accessing the restricted data from the

National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. We acknowledge the important contribution of Kyle

Crowder to the construction of the geographic indicators. All errors and omissions remain our own.

This project was funded, in part, by a grant provided by the University of Missouri—St. Louis.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Coun-

cil under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant

Agreement n. 615159 (ERC Consolidator Grant DEPRIVEDHOODS, Socio-spatial inequality,

deprived neighbourhoods, and neighbourhood effects); and from the Marie Curie programme

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is

properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

C2016 The Authors. Criminology published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

on behalf of American Society of Criminology. doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12110

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 54 Number 3 434–458 2016 434

EXTRALOCAL NEIGHBORHOODS AND DELINQUENCY 435

A central aim of contemporary criminological research has been to identify the struc-

tural characteristics of communities associated with crime and violence. Much of this re-

search has focused on the associations between community characteristics, such as the

level of socioeconomic disadvantage, and aggregate crime rates. Although there has been

some discussion over the functional form of this association, the general consensus is that

economic deprivation and the social processes at work in disadvantaged communities

contribute to higher rates of criminal behavior (Hannon and Knapp, 2003; Krivo and

Peterson, 1996; McNulty, 2001). More recently, scholarly attention has shifted toward

understanding how community characteristics influence individual behavior and whether

these characteristics condition the association between individual risk factors and offend-

ing (Jones and Lynam, 2009; Lynam et al., 2000; Vazsonyi, Cleveland, and Wiebe, 2006;

Zimmerman, 2010; Zimmerman and Messner, 2011). This research has indicated that

neighborhood processes also increase risky behaviors at the individual level; however,

when detected, these effect sizes are much smaller in magnitude than those reported in

studies of aggregate crime rates (Kubrin and Weitzer, 2003). This finding is perplexing

because indicators of structural disadvantage are among the most robust predictors of

neighborhood crime rates.

Research linking neighborhood characteristics with individual behavior has typically

relied on measures of neighborhood context derived from census data characterizing sur-

vey respondents’ residential census tracts. A potential limitation of this approach is that

the propensity to offend might be influenced not only by the characteristics of individu-

als’ immediate neighborhoods but also by the characteristics of their surrounding neigh-

borhoods. People often spend time in activity spaces in nearby communities (Jones and

Pebley, 2014; Krivo et al., 2013). And indeed, prior research has shown that individuals

often commit crimes outside of their neighborhoods of residence (Sampson, Morenoff,

and Gannon-Rowley, 2002; Wikstr ¨

om et al., 2010). Accordingly, the criminogenic im-

pulses of residents of a given neighborhood could be influenced by the characteristics of

the residents, and the opportunities to offend, in surrounding neighborhoods.

Neighborhoods are embedded within larger communities and are rarely spatially

independent of one another. Research on aggregate crime rates has demonstrated that

criminogenic processes at work in one neighborhood are influenced by the characteristics

of surrounding neighborhoods (Baller et al., 2001; Deane et al., 2008; Peterson and Krivo,

2009). It follows that characteristics of neighborhoods outside of, but geographically

proximate to, individuals’ residential neighborhoods—sometimes referred to as “ex-

tralocal” (Crowder and South, 2011) or “extended” (Graif, 2015) neighborhoods—may

affect individuals’ propensity to engage in criminal conduct. Indeed, emerging research

has already indicated that the characteristics of extralocal neighborhoods, considered

alongside the characteristics of residential neighborhood environments, help to explain

variation in other high-risk youth behaviors such as premarital childbearing and dropping

out of high school (Crowder and South, 2011; South and Crowder, 2010). Furthermore,

residential proximity to economic disadvantage in the broader community may play a

similar role in adolescent delinquency (Graif, 2015; Odgers et al., 2015). Accordingly, a

under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / Career Integration

Grant n. PCIG10-GA-2011-303728 (CIG Grant NBHCHOICE, Neighbourhood choice, neigh-

bourhood sorting, and neighbourhood effects). Direct correspondence to Matt Vogel, Department

of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri—St. Louis, 539 Lucas Hall, St. Louis,

MO 63121-4400 (e-mail: vogelma@umsl.edu).