The Association Between Social Disorganization and Rural Violence Is Sensitive to the Measurement of the Dependent Variable

• Published date: 01 June 2013
• Date: 01 June 2013
• Author: Maria T. Kaylen,William Alex Pridemore
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016813476715
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

The Association Between

Social Disorganization and

Rural Violence Is Sensitive

to the Measurement of the

Dependent Variable

Maria T. Kaylen

1

and William Alex Pridemore

1

Abstract

A widely cited study by Osgood and Chambers appeared to extend the generalizability of social

disorganization theory to youth violence in rural areas. The results of a very similar study we

conducted, however, did not show support for social disorganization, and we concluded that the

theory may not be as robust an explanation for rural youth violence as believed. In the current

article, we take an important first step in addressing the conflicting findings by examining three likely

methodological reasons for the inconsistent results: spatial autocorrelation, sample composition,

and measurement of the dependent variable. Multiple tests suggest the first two explanations do not

influence the results. Our analyses do indicate, however, that the association between social dis-

organization and violence in rural areas is sensitive to how the dependent variable is measured. We

conclude that scholars should not rely solely on official crime data from rural areas when testing

sociological and criminological theories.

Keywords

structural theories of crime causation, crime/delinquency theory, criminal victimization, quantitative

methods

Introduction

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI, 2009) issued the 2008 Crime in the United States:

Preliminary Annual Uniform Crime Report in the summer of 2009. News outlets across the country

reported that while violent crimes were decreasing in cities with one million residents or more, small

towns with less than 10,000 residents were experiencing increases in violent crimes. While rural

crime has received increasing attention in the last decade, it is still an understudied phenomenon.

1

Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

Corresponding Author:

Maria T. Kaylen, Department of Criminal Justice, Indiana University, 1033 E. Third Street, Sycamore Hall 302, Bloomington,

IN 47405, USA.

Email: mkaylen@indiana.edu

Criminal Justice Review

38(2) 169-189

ª2013 Georgia State University

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DOI: 10.1177/0734016813476715

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Further, rural areas are sometimes conceptualized as miniature versions of urban areas, with similar

social processes occurring at a smaller scale. Others suggest that rural areas are part of a continuum

and that there are not only similarities and differences between rural and urban areas but within areas

defined as rural as well (Wells & Weisheit, 2004). Until recently, however, hypotheses about rural

and urban similarities and differences with respect to crime and its causes have gone untested.

The structural theory that has received the majority of attention in studies of crime in rural areas is

social disorganization theory. The handful of studies on this topic relied on arrest data and revealed

mixed results, though authors tend to conclude the theory generalizes to rural areas (Barnett &

Mencken, 2002; Bouffard & Muftic´, 2006; Lee, Maume, & Ousey, 2003; Osgood & Chambers,

2000; Petee & Kowalski, 1993). Unfortunately, these studies all use slightly different measures of

social disorganization, different samples, and different measures of dependent variables, so expla-

nations for their inconsistencies are difficult to isolate.

In a recent study, on the other hand, we used the exact same measures of the explanatory variables

as Osgood and Chambers (2000), yet relative to the latter come to very different conclusions about

the generalizability of social disorganization to rural youth violence (Kaylen & Pridemore, 2011).

We suggested three likely methodological reasons for the conflicting results of the two studies

1

: Spa-

tial autocorrelation, sample composition, and measurement of the dependent variable. The goal of

this article is to test systematically these three potential explanations for the conflicting results of

these two very similar studies of social disorganization and rural youth violence. While the current

analysis is specific to these two studies, the nature of the findings will have a broad impact on the

growing area of crime in rural areas.

Literature Review

Rural Social Disorganization

Although little empirical research has focused on social disorganization in rural settings, there are

theoretical reasons to believe the theory is applicable to rural communities. The concept of social

disorganization was popularized by Shaw and McKay’s (1942) analysis of juvenile delinquency

across Chicago neighborhoods. While the theory has been refined over time, the general premise

remains that communities with high rates of poverty, residential instability, and ethnic heterogeneity

are socially disorganized. That is, such communities are more likely to be poorly integrated and thus

less able to exert informal social control, properly socialize youth, and solve common problems,

thereby resulting in higher rates of crime. The much later work of Sampson (1985) and Sampson

and Groves (1989) added family disruption to the list of structural measures of social

disorganization.

A variety of literature exists beyond social disorganization theory thatlinks community social and

economic change to disorganization in both rural and urban areas. Rapid population growth, ethnic

diversity, and the percentage of female-headed households are related to social problems in commu-

nities of all sizes (Bacigalupi & Freudenburg, 1983; Freudenburg & Jones, 1991; Guillaume &

Wenson, 1980; Rephann, 1999). Research has consistently found links between these factors and

crime rates in general (Allan & Steffensmeier, 1989; Crutchfield, 1989; Shihadeh & Ousey, 1998;

White, 1999).Major economic changes are also associated with disorganization similarlyin urban and

rural settings.Deindustrializationand economic restructuringin urban areas and the farm crisisin rural

areas similarly led to outmigration of residents, decreased tax bases, increased concentrations of

poverty, and weaker social institutions (Bluestone & Harrison, 1982; Ginder, Stone, & Otto, 1985;

Wilson, 1996). These similar social effects of economic structural changes in rural and urban areas

provide indirect support for the hypothesis that the structural antecedents of social disorganiza-

tion—residential instability, family disruption, poverty, and ethnic heterogeneity—are similarly

170 Criminal Justice Review 38(2)