The impact of parenting style on fear of crime among adolescent girls and boys

Research on adolescent fear of crime is still relatively limited and often simply applies theoretical explanations proposed for adults. This study strives to extend current knowledge in this field by analyzing the impact of parenting style on fear of crime, namely parental attachment, parental supervision, and parental support of adolescent autonomy, while also considering possible gender differences. Using data from a self-report survey of approximately 1500 Czech adolescents, a hierarchical regression analysis is employed to examine these relationships while controlling for socio-demographic variables, environmental disorder, leisure time indicators, as well as victimization experience. The results suggest that higher parental supervision and lower parental support of adolescent autonomy are associated with increased fear of crime among adolescents. In addition, a gender-specific effect is found for parental attachment which somewhat decreases fear of crime for boys and increases it for girls. Nevertheless, the overall impact of parental indicators on fear of crime is relatively low. The implications and limitations of these findings are discussed.     

Extrapolative simulation of neighborhood networks based on population spatial distribution: Do they predict crime?

Objectives

Previous criminological scholarship has posited that network ties among neighborhood residents may impact crime rates, but has done little to consider the specific ways in which network structure may enhance or inhibit criminal activity. A lack of data on social ties has arguably led to this state of affairs. We propose to avoid this limitation by demonstrating a novel approach of extrapolatively simulating network ties and constructing structural network measures to assess their effect on neighborhood crime rates.

Methods

We first spatially locate the households of a city into their constituent blocks. Then, we employ spatial interaction functions based on prior empirical work and simulate a network of social ties among these residents. From this simulated network, we compute network statistics that more appropriately capture the notions of cohesion and information diffusion that underlie theories of networks and crime.

Results

We show that these network statistics are robust predictors of the levels of crime in five separate cities (above standard controls) at the very micro geographic level of blocks and block groups.

Conclusions

We conclude by considering extensions of the approach that account for homophily in the formation of network ties.     

Youth co-offending networks: An investigation of social and spatial effects

This research tests the relative contribution of social distance and spatial distance to the presence of ties between neighborhoods based on youth co-offending. Using official court data from a large U.S. metropolitan area, a set of dyad independence and exponential random graph models are estimated in order to investigate the characteristics of neighborhoods that foster co-offending. Results reveal significant effects of both social and spatial distance. Social distance contributes to network structure net of spatial proximity, though spatial factors better explain the overall network structure. These results have methodological implications for the analysis of spatial effects and criminal behavior.     

Neighborhood co-offending networks,structural embeddedness,and violent crime in Chicago

Neighborhood disparities in crime are a persistent feature of U.S. cities. Scholars have documented that both local structural conditions and characteristics of spatially proximate communities influence neighborhood crime rates. Previous studies on neighborhood inequality in crime, however, are limited by their focus on identifying average spillover effects between pairs of spatially contiguous neighborhoods, and have neglected to consider how the broader social organization of the city influences local outcomes. This study examines the role of neighborhood-level criminal networks in shaping the distribution of crime throughout cities. Employing arrest records and survey data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, we construct a neighborhood-level co-offending network for Chicago for 2001. We use this network to investigate how a focal neighborhood’s homicide rate is influenced by its structural embeddedness within the larger inter-neighborhood co-offending network. Results indicate that a neighborhood’s embeddedness increases the local homicide rate, even after controlling for the neighborhood’s internal propensity toward crime and accounting for unobserved spatial processes.     

Micro-structure in micro-neighborhoods: A new social distance measure,and its effect on individual and aggregated perceptions of crime and disorder

This study links social network methodology with the social disorganization literature to test the effect of block-level social distance on neighborhood perceived crime and disorder. Employing a unique study design that allows creating matrices of social distance (based on demographic characteristics) between 11 residents on each of over 650 blocks at three time points, we find that more socially distant residents perceive more disorder than their neighbors. Consistent with the bridging social capital literature, overall social distance in the block has a curvilinear relationship with perceived crime. And blocks with two cohesive subgroups, based on social distance, have lower levels of perceived disorder.     

Violence,fear of crime,and Islam scepticism

Many authors have raised the question whether Islam scepticism is different from more general expressions of xenophobia. This paper argues that in order to give the thesis of a differentiation between these attitudes a fair chance (1) it should be tested among the more highly educated part of the population, and (2) the analysis should include controls for determinants that might be specific to Islam scepticism. Therefore this contribution researches the specificity of Islam scepticism among first-year university students. Five forms of prejudice are distinguished, alongside Islam scepticism. It is observed: (1) that Islam scepticism is empirically distinct from those forms of prejudice; (2) that there are nonetheless very strong relationships between the different forms of prejudice and Islam scepticism, and the latter is to a large extent determined by more general forms of prejudice; (3) yet, even when such influences are taken into account, the latter attitude is still additionally influenced by feelings of insecurity.     

Social context,spatial structure and social network structure

Frequently, social networks are studied in their own right with analyses devoid of contextual details. Yet contextual features – both social and spatial – can have impacts on the networks formed within them. This idea is explored with five empirical networks representing different contexts and the use of distinct modeling strategies. These strategies include network visualizations, QAP regression, exponential random graph models, blockmodeling and a combination of blockmodels with exponential random graph models within a single framework. We start with two empirical examples of networks inside organizations. The familiar Bank Wiring Room data show that the social organization (social context) and spatial arrangement of the room help account for the social relations formed there. The second example comes from a police academy where two designed arrangements, one social and one spatial, powerfully determine the relational social structures formed by recruits. The next example is an inter-organizational network that emerged as part of a response to a natural disaster where features of the improvised context helped account for the relations that formed between organizations participating in the search and rescue mission. We then consider an anthropological example of signed relations among sub-tribes in the New Guinea highlands where the physical geography is fixed. This is followed by a trading network off the Dalmatian coast where geography and physical conditions matter. Through these examples, we show that context matters by shaping the structure of networks that form and that a variety of network analytic tools can be mobilized to reveal how networks are shaped, in part, by social and spatial contexts. Implications for studying social networks are suggested.     

Social and spatial networks: Kinship distance and dwelling unit proximity in rural Thailand

We address a long hypothesized relationship between the proximity of individuals’ dwelling units and their kinship association. Better understanding this relationship is important because of its implications for contact and association among members of a society. In this paper, we use a unique dataset from Nang Rong, Thailand which contains dwelling unit locations (GPS) and saturated kinship networks of all individuals living in 51 agricultural villages. After presenting arguments for a relationship between individuals’ dwelling unit locations and their kinship relations as well as the particulars of our case study, we introduce the data and describe our analytic approach. We analyze how kinship – considered as both a system linking collections of individuals in an extended kinship network and as dyadic links between pairs of individuals – patterns the proximity of dwelling units in rural villages. The results show that in general, extended kin live closer to one another than do unrelated individuals. Further, the degree of relatedness between kin correlates with the distance between their dwelling units. Close kin are more likely to co-reside, a fact which drives much of the relationship between kinship relatedness and dwelling unit proximity within villages. There is nevertheless suggestive evidence of a relationship between kinship association and dwelling unit proximity among kin who do not live together.     

Social Capital and Neighborhood Poverty

ABSTRACT

Research indicates that concentrated neighborhood poverty has numerous detrimental effects on the health and well-being of individuals, families, and communities. The term “neighborhood effects” has been used to describe the interaction between socioeconomic disadvantage and social problems at the neighborhood level. Social capital theory, defined broadly as social networks characterized by trust and reciprocity represents one prominent explanation for the phenomenon of neighborhood effects. Within poor neighborhoods, it is theorized that socioeconomic characteristics of the neighborhood foster inadequate social capital and it is this low level of social capital that leads to the phenomenon of neighborhood effects. In order to explore the utility of social capital theory in explaining neighborhood effects, this paper argues for an ecologically-grounded model of social capital that allows for the different ways in which social capital operates within different types of neighborhoods. Implications for social work practice, policy and education are discussed.     

Social complex contagion in music listenership: A natural experiment with 1.3 million participants

Can live music events generate complex contagion in music streaming? This paper finds evidence in the affirmative—but only for the most popular artists. We generate a novel dataset from a music tracking website to analyse the listenership history of 1.3 million users over a two-month time horizon. We show that attending a music artist’s live concert increases that artist’s listenership among the attendees of the concert by approximately 1 song per day per attendee (p-value < 0.001). Moreover, this effect is contagious and can spread to users who did not attend the event. However, whether or not contagion occurs depends on the type of artist. We only observe contagious increases in listenership for popular artists (∼0.06 more daily plays per friend of an attendee [p < 0.001]), while the effect is absent for emerging stars. The contagion effect size increases monotonically with the number of friends who have attended the live event.     

Neither global nor local: Heterogeneous connectivity in spatial network structures of world migration

For a long time, geographic regions were considered the dominant spatial arbiter of international migration of people. However, since the late 1970s, many scholars have argued that movements reach beyond contiguous regions to connect distant, dispersed, and previously disconnected countries across the globe. The precise structure of world migration, however, remains an open question. We apply network analysis that incorporates spatial information to international migration-stock data to examine what multilateral structures of world migration have emerged from the interplay of regional concentration (local cohesion) and global interconnectedness (global cohesion) for the period 1960–2000. In the world migration network (WMN), nodes represent countries located in geographic space, and edges represent migrants from an origin country who live in a destination country during each decade. We characterize the large-scale structure and evolution of the WMN by algorithmically detecting international migration communities (i.e., sets of countries that are densely connected via migration) using a generalized modularity function for spatial, temporal, and directed networks. Our findings for the whole network suggest that movements in the WMN deviate significantly from the regional boundaries of the world and that international migration communities have become globally interconnected over time. However, we observe a strong variability in the distribution of strengths, neighborhood overlaps, and lengths of migration edges in the WMN. This manifests as three types of communities: global, local, and glocal. We find that long-distance movements in global communities bridge multiple non-contiguous countries, whereas local (and, to a lesser extent, glocal) communities remain trapped in contiguous geographic regions (or neighboring regions) for almost the whole period, contributing to a spatially fragmented WMN. Our findings demonstrate that world migration is neither regionally concentrated nor globally interconnected, but instead exhibits a heterogeneous connectivity pattern that channels unequal migration opportunities across the world.     

Reconfiguring Friendships: Social relationships and the Internet

Debate on the social role of the Internet has centred on whether its use will tend to isolate or connect individuals, undermining or reinforcing social ties. This study moves away from this focus on more or less connectivity to explore the degree to which people use the Internet to make new friends and, thereby, reconfigure their social networks. The analysis identifies those who create new ties through the Internet and investigates under what conditions these online ties migrate to face to face settings. The analysis is based on data from the 2005 Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS), a national probability sample survey of individuals aged 14 and over in Britain. The findings indicate that about 20 per cent of Internet users have met new friends online, and about half of these individuals go on to meet one or more of these virtual friends in person. Sociodemographic characteristics, such as being single, shape patterns of Internet use, and are related to the greater propensity of some individuals to make online social relationships. However, experience with the Internet and the ways people choose to use the Internet, such as for chatting or communicating more generally, are most directly associated with who makes new connections over the Internet and who does not. These findings suggest that the Internet plays an important role in reconfiguring the social networks of many users. Also, multivariate analyses indicate that the dynamics of online friendships are driven more by the idiosyncratic digital choices made by users of the Internet than by any mechanistic social or technological determinism.     

In a Nervous Voice: Acoustic Analysis and Perception of Anxiety in Social Phobics’ Speech

This study investigated the effects of anxiety on nonverbal aspects of speech using data collected in the framework of a large study of social phobia treatment. The speech of social phobics (N = 71) was recorded during an anxiogenic public speaking task both before and after treatment. The speech samples were analyzed with respect to various acoustic parameters related to pitch, loudness, voice quality, and temporal aspects of speech. The samples were further content-masked by low-pass filtering (which obscures the linguistic content of the speech but preserves nonverbal affective cues) and subjected to listening tests. Results showed that a decrease in experienced state anxiety after treatment was accompanied by corresponding decreases in (a) several acoustic parameters (i.e., mean and maximum voice pitch, high-frequency components in the energy spectrum, and proportion of silent pauses), and (b) listeners’ perceived level of nervousness. Both speakers’ self-ratings of state anxiety and listeners’ ratings of perceived nervousness were further correlated with similar acoustic parameters. The results complement earlier studies on vocal affect expression which have been conducted on posed, rather than authentic, emotional speech.     

Social Movements and Social Networks: Introduction

In this Introduction we provide a brief literature review of work on social networks and social movements, a brief introduction to certain key concepts and debates in social network analysis, and a brief introduction to the articles which follow in the special issue.     

Social networks and spatial configuration—How office layouts drive social interaction

This paper analyzes the spatial dimensions of office layouts in diverse knowledge-intensive workplace environments based on the theoretical and methodological propositions of Space Syntax, and brings this together with the analysis of intra-organizational interaction networks. Physical distances between agents are modeled in different ways and used as explanatory variables in exponential random graph modeling. The paper shows that spatial configuration in offices can be considered an important but not sole rationale for tie formation. Furthermore, it is shown that spatial distance measures based on detailed configurational analysis outperform simple Euclidean distance metrics in predicting social ties.     

Social networks of knowledge production in Brazilian psychology: comparing sub-areas

The social processes underlying the production of scientific knowledge make it an inherently social endeavor. The interaction between systems of thought and affiliation has been subject of the sociology of science, with remarkable developments in studies on the structure of scientific fields based on social networks analysis. Although psychology is one of the pioneer fields investigated in this literature, there is scarcity of research on psychology. The objective of this paper is to describe the social networks’ dynamics of knowledge production in psychology in Brazil, comparing association patterns among its sub-areas. For this purpose, 395 researchers responded an electronic questionnaire about their relationships. Networks of nine psychology sub-areas were analyzed for structural properties (i.e. density, centrality) and relational exchanges (the connecting roles of boundary spanners and central connectors). Findings showed different structures and connectivity patterns between networks, but most of these areas configure as small worlds. Discussion explores implications of these findings for the production of knowledge within areas, and for the national production of psychological knowledge as a whole, with effects on the international projection of knowledge produced in Brazil.     

HPV vaccination campaign fear visuals: An eye-tracking study exploring effects of visual attention and type on message informative value,recall, and behavioral intentions

HPV is the most common sexually transmitted disease, and there are alarming global disparities in cervical cancer and HPV vaccination uptake (CDC, 2016a). To inform HPV vaccination public health campaigns, an experiment with a psychophysiological measure (eye-tracking) explores the effects of visual attention to vaccination messages on message recall, informative value, and behavioral intentions. Results indicate 1) visual type affects recall and informative value of vaccination messages as well as intentions to vaccinate; 2) visual attention is negatively related to message recall only when a non-fear visual is used; and 3) visual attention predicts intent to vaccinate only when a fear visual is utilized. These results suggest the use of fear appeals in health, crisis, and risk public relations campaigns may promote performance of recommended safeguarding behaviors.     

Time together,time apart: An analysis of wives' solitary time and shared time with spouses

The time spouses spend together in household work activities, leisure activities, and in eating are analyzed and compared with the time spent alone by wives in these same activities. The purpose of the analysis is to distinguish between two hypotheses: (a) that the time spent by spouses together in the same activity is charged with extra meaning when compared with the time spent by the wife alone in the same activity; and (b) that the time spent by spouses together in the same activity is a perfect substitute for time spent alone in the same activity by the wife. Multivariate probit, OLS and Tobit analyses are conducted with data taken from the 1977–78 NE-113 Time-Use Data for Louisiana, New York, Utah, and Wisconsin. Statistical tests confirm the hypothesis that shared times in the three activities studied are charged with extra meaning when compared with wives' solitary time in the same activities. Solitary times spent by the wife in the three activities are negatively related with family income. Solitary time spent by wives in household work activities and in leisure activities are positively related to husband's price of time. Spouses' shared times in these activities rise and wives' solitary times fall on weekends.Thanks are due to Bob Avery, Barbara Brown, Robin Douthitt, Jenny Gerner, Jutta Joesch, Sally Lloyd, Cathy Zick, Peter Zorn, members of S-206 Time-Use Regional Committee, the graduate research workshop of the Department of Family and Consumer Studies, University of Utah, the seminar participants at Utah State University, and the seminar participants of the Department of Family Economics and Management, University of Missouri for stimulating, cautionary, and corrective discussions pertaining to this paper. Any remaining errors and obscurities are the responsibility of the authors.W. Keith Bryant is Professor, Consumer Economics and Housing, 117D Martha Van Rensselaer Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853. Dr. Bryant received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University. Yan Wang is MacNamara Post-Doctorate Fellow, The World Bank, Washington, DC. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University.     

Social context and network formation: An experimental study

Recently, there has been increasing interest in determining which social network structures emerge as a consequence of the conscious actions of actors. Motivated by the belief that “networks matter” in reaching personal objectives, it is a natural assumption that actors try to optimize their network position. Starting from the notion that an optimal network position depends on the social context, we examine how actors change their networks to reach better positions in various contexts. Distinguishing between three social contexts (a neutral context, a context in which closed triads are costly, and a context in which closed triads are beneficial), theoretical results predict that emerging networks are contingent on the incentives that are present in these contexts. Experiments are used to test whether networks that are theoretically predicted to be stable are also stable experimentally. We find that emerging networks correspond to a large extent with the predicted networks. Consequently, they are contingent on the incentives present in various social contexts. In addition, we find that subjects tend to form specific stable networks with a higher probability than predicted, namely, efficient networks and networks in which everyone is equally well off.     

Neighborhood isolation in Chicago: Violent crime effects on structural isolation and homophily in inter-neighborhood commuting networks

Urban sociologists and criminologists have long been interested in the link between neighborhood isolation and crime. Yet studies have focused predominantly on the internal dimension of social isolation (i.e., increased social disorganization and insufficient jobs and opportunities). This study highlights the need to assess the external dimension of neighborhood isolation, the disconnectedness from other neighborhoods in the city. Analyses of Chicago's neighborhood commuting network over twelve years (2002–2013) showed that violence predicted network isolation. Moreover, pairwise similarity in neighborhood violence predicted commuting ties, supporting homophily expectations. Violence homophily affected tie formation most, while neighborhood violence was important in dissolving ties.