Adverse Neighborhood Conditions and Sanction Risk Perceptions: Using SEM to Examine Direct and Indirect Effects

Objectives

The present study examines how individuals’ sanction risk perceptions are shaped by neighborhood context.

Methods

Using structural equation modeling on data from waves 6 and 7 of the National Youth Survey, we assess the direct and indirect relationships between adverse neighborhood conditions and two dimensions of sanction risk perceptions: the certainty of punishment and perceived shame. In addition, the role of shame as a mediator between neighborhood context and certainty of punishment is also investigated.

Results

The results indicate that adverse neighborhood conditions indirectly affect both forms of sanction risk perceptions, and additional results show that perceived shame fully mediates the effect of neighborhood conditions on perceptions of the certainty of punishment.

Conclusions

The perceptual deterrence/rational choice perspective will need to be revised to accommodate more explicitly the role of neighborhood context in shaping sanction risk perceptions.     

A closer look at risk factors for public-private partnerships in Singapore: six case studies

ABSTRACT

Despite its global popularity over the past few decades, the public-private partnership (PPP) has not always led to successful outcomes, due largely to a number of risk factors associated with the projects. To explain how and why PPPs sometimes fail, this study considers the success-failure continuum of Singapore’s recent PPP experience from 2000 to 2019. After taking a critical, close look at the six failed cases, we identify the following latent risk factors: unstable financial capacity during the execution period of a project, force majeure unforeseen problems that arise, a lack of technical and/or financial foresight, poor corporate management (e.g. delays in construction and poor-quality service delivery), and an unfavourable investment environment stemming from the lack of a clear and supportive governance framework. In addition, we find that most risk factors tend to appear during the contract management (pre-operation) and project management (operation) phases. Such risks seem to drive the operational failure and subsequent contract termination of multiple unsuccessful PPPs, simultaneously (and sometimes sequentially) rather than in isolated fashion. All in all, this study offers for policymakers that better risk allocation and proper, mutual coordination between the public and private partners represent essential factors for PPP success.     

Street Egohood: An Alternative Perspective of Measuring Neighborhood and Spatial Patterns of Crime

Objectives

The current study proposes an approach that accounts for the importance of streets while at the same time accounting for the overlapping spatial nature of social and physical environments captured by the egohood approach. Our approach utilizes overlapping clusters of streets based on the street network distance, which we term street egohoods.

Methods

We used the street segment as a base unit and employed two strategies in clustering the street segments: (1) based on the First Order Queen Contiguity; and (2) based on the street network distance considering physical barriers. We utilized our approaches for measuring ecological factors and estimated crime rates in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

Results

We found that whereas certain socio-demographics, land use, and business employee measures show stronger relationships with crime when measured at the smaller street based unit, a number of them actually exhibited stronger relationships when measured using our larger street egohoods. We compared the results for our three-sized street egohoods to street segments and two sizes of block egohoods proposed by Hipp and Boessen (Criminology 51(2):287–327, 2013) and found that two egohood strategies essentially are not different at the quarter mile egohood level but this similarity appears lower when looking at the half mile egohood level. Also, the street egohood models are a better fit for predicting violent and property crime compared to the block egohood models.

Conclusions

A primary contribution of the current study is to develop and propose a new perspective of measuring neighborhood based on urban streets. We empirically demonstrated that whereas certain socio-demographic measures show the strongest relationship with crime when measured at the micro geographic unit of street segments, a number of them actually exhibited the strongest relationship when measured using our larger street egohoods. We hope future research can use egohoods to expand understanding of neighborhoods and crime.

     

Branding K-REDD+ and its implications for South Korea's middle power diplomacy

ABSTRACT

The need for new and stronger middle power diplomacy is growing as global challenges are increasingly governed by various horizontal inter- and trans-national networks. Climate change is one of the most complex and urgent global challenges that require collective action, and it is an issue for which more middle power leadership is greatly needed. The Republic of Korea (ROK) has been successful in becoming a primary actor in green growth governance, and its success has been attributed to its strategic middlepowermanship, integrating both material and ideational contents. Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) in tropical developing countries has been lauded as an immediate and effective solution to mitigate climate change. ROK's unique history of forest transition before rapid economic growth highlights the fact that improving forest management is possible even with imperfect governance, rapid population growth, and low economic development. The lessons learned from ROK's forest transition can be developed as a distinct contribution to the international effort to address forest-related impacts on climate change, and offer an important opportunity for ROK to play a constructive role and achieve enhanced stature within the international community.     

Study on the standard components of digital forensics laboratory

Recently, digital forensics has become increasingly important as it is used by investigation agencies, corporate, and private sector. To supplement the limitations of evidence capacity and be recognized in court, it is essential to establish an environment that ensures the integrity of the entire process ranging from collecting and analyzing to submitting digital evidence to court. In this study, common elements were extracted by comparing and analyzing ISO/IEC 17025, 27001 standards and Interpol and Council of Europe (CoE) guidelines to derive the necessary components for building a digital forensic laboratory. Subsequently, based on 21 digital forensic experts in the field, Delphi survey and verifications were conducted in three rounds. As a result, 40 components from seven areas were derived. The research results are based on the establishment, operation, management, and authentication of a digital forensics laboratory suitable for the domestic environment, with added credibility through collection of the opinions of 21 experts in the field of digital forensics in Korea. This study can be referred to in establishing digital forensic laboratories in national, public, and private digital forensic organizations as well as for employing as competency measurement criteria in courts to evaluate the reliability of the analysis results.     

Trusting the State,Trusting Each Other? The Effect of Institutional Trust on Social Trust

Trust in state institutions is a prominent explanation of social trust. However, previous—mainly cross-sectional—analyses provide limited causal evidence regarding the relationship between institutional trust and social trust and it is thus essentially unknown whether an observed relationship reflects reverse causality (social trust forming institutional trust), or both forms of trust reflecting deep-seated dispositions (common confounding). Against the backdrop of the shortcomings of previous cross-sectional analyses, this paper utilizes two Danish panel surveys containing measures of both types of trust for the same individuals surveyed at multiple points in time over a long time-span (up to 18 years) to address the potentially reverse and/or spurious relationship. Using individual fixed effects and cross-lagged panel models, the results provide strong evidence of trust in state institutions exercising a causal impact on social trust, whereas the evidence for a reverse relationship is limited.