Giving Your Chinese a Local Flavor

<正>Wang,the driver of our school bus,is the most animated speaker I have ever seen—in any language. He is generally so excitable on the drive to and from school that he entertains all the teachers.He maintains a constant flow of     

CLOSE‐UPS AND THE SCALE OF ECOLOGY: LAND USES AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF SOCIAL CONTEXT AND CRIME

Whereas one line of recent neighborhood research has placed an emphasis on zooming into smaller units of analysis such as street blocks, another line of research has suggested that even the meso‐area of neighborhoods is too narrow and that the area surrounding the neighborhood is also important. Thus, there is a need to examine the scale at which the social ecology impacts crime. We use data from seven cities from around the year 2000 to test our research questions using multilevel negative binomial regression models (N = 73,010 blocks and 8,231 block groups). Our results suggest that although many neighborhood factors seem to operate on the microscale of blocks, others seem to have a much broader impact. In addition, we find that racially and ethnically homogenous blocks within heterogeneous block groups have the most crime. Our findings also show the strongest results for a multitude of land‐use measures and that these measures sharpen some of the associations from social characteristics. Thus, we find that accounting for multiple scales simultaneously is important in ecological studies of crime.     

EGOHOODS AS WAVES WASHING ACROSS THE CITY: A NEW MEASURE OF “NEIGHBORHOODS”

Defining “neighborhoods” is a bedeviling challenge faced by all studies of neighborhood effects and ecological models of social processes. Although scholars frequently lament the inadequacies of the various existing definitions of “neighborhood,” we argue that previous strategies relying on nonoverlapping boundaries such as block groups and tracts are fundamentally flawed. The approach taken here instead builds on insights of the mental mapping literature, the social networks literature, the daily activities pattern literature, and the travel to crime literature to propose a new definition of neighborhoods: egohoods. These egohoods are conceptualized as waves washing across the surface of cities, as opposed to independent units with nonoverlapping boundaries. This approach is illustrated using crime data from nine cities: Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Los Angeles, Sacramento, St. Louis, and Tucson. The results show that measures aggregated to our egohoods explain more of the variation in crime across the social environment than do models with measures aggregated to block groups or tracts. The results also suggest that measuring inequality in egohoods provides dramatically stronger positive effects on crime rates than when using the nonoverlapping boundary approach, highlighting the important new insights that can be obtained by using our egohood approach.