UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Community change, school disorder, school social bonds, and youth gang involvement(2013) Yiu, Ho Lam (Eva); Gottfredson, Gary D; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Kirk and Laub (2010) observed that community effects on crime should be studied as dynamic processes as communities change. The present research examined schools' role in regulating youth behavior and how community change affects school climate (School Disorder and School Social Bonds; SSB) using social disorganization and social bonds theories. G. Gottfredson, Gottfredson, Czeh, Cantor, Crosse, and Hantman (2000) collected data from a large, national probability sample of schools to examine youth gang problems and school-based intervention and prevention programs. I examined a subsample (N = 269) of these schools. Variables were collected from school rosters and self-report questionnaires. School variables were modeled as latent variables derived from the variance in student responses that is attributed to the school to which the student belonged. Community variables were constructed from the 1990 and 2000 Census data. Multilevel latent variable structural modeling allowed for the examination of individual and community effects on self-reported gang participation. I argued that school characteristics were related to its community's characteristics, and that school variables contributed to student-reported gang involvement. School characteristics were also hypothesized to mediate the relation between community change and a student's likelihood of gang involvement. Some hypotheses were supported by this research. Findings lend support for the extension of social bonds theory to the school-level. Significant student predictors of the probability of gang involvement included Personal Victimization, Social Bonds, Fear, minority status, and age. At the group-level, SSB and School Disorder explained significant variance in gang involvement in the hypothesized directions, net of all other variables already in the model. A partial mediation of the relationship between School Disorder and the likelihood of gang involvement by the student variables was found. The community change variables were somewhat independent of the school characteristics measured. School-based gang prevention efforts may benefit from a climate characterized by prosocial bonds and low social disorganization, especially for schools in communities that have high levels of concentrated disadvantage and communities projected to experience demographic change. Practical applications of these findings in schools include smaller student-to-teacher ratios and implementing rules that are fair and clear.Item CAUSAL OR MERELY CO-EXISTING: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF VIOLENCE AND DISORDER AT PLACES(2007-08-02) Yang, Sue-Ming; Weisburd, David; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research examines the relationship between disorder and violence across geography, specifically whether disorder and violence are causally related. This issue has generated much debate in the field of criminology. The broken windows thesis argues that untended disorder will lead to crime while social disorganization theory suggests that these two phenomena are merely spuriously related. To examine the longitudinal relationship between disorder and violence, this dissertation used data from the city of Seattle, Washington and analyzed them with dynamic statistical tools. Group-based trajectory analysis was used to identify different patterns of disorder and violence. The findings reveal a moderate level of spatial association between disorder and violence. Moreover, the results show that lack of disorder may be a protective factor for places in preventing future crime. This particular finding provides a new insight for crime prevention strategy. I further use Granger causality tests to examine the causal association between disorder and violence within selected violence and disorder hotspots. Findings from the Granger causality tests indicate that disorder does not lead to violence. As such the results suggest that public policy targeting disorder may not lead to crime reduction benefits. This particular finding challenges the notion of broken windows policing. Although broken windows policing might increase the chance to apprehend criminals due to the spatial clustering of social disorder and violence, the findings suggest that reducing levels of disorder will be unlikely to have strong impacts on crime rates. Additionally, potential collateral effects of police crackdowns on disorder need to be considered. Lastly, social disorder and physical disorder seem to relate to violence differently. Specifically, social disorder corresponds with violence more strongly than physical disorder. This issue has theoretical implications and should be explored further in future research.