(Reprinted from the Boston Globe 8/15/97)

Study shows cohesiveness curbs neighborhood violence. The level of violence in a neighborhood is influenced more by cohesiveness among its residents--such things as being willing to look after other people's children and mind others' business-than by poverty, racial makeup, or transience of the population, according to the first findings of a five-year study being released today. The analysis, involving 343 Chicago neighborhoods, found that social cohesion accounted for more than 75 percent of the variation among neighborhoods in levels of violence, far more than did demographics and residential stability.

The study was based on lengthy interviews with almost 9000 Chicago residents from all kinds of neighborhoods, from low to high income, from predominantly white to predominantly minority, from stable to rapidly changing. It assessed the trust among residents that neighbors might do such things as stop children from spray painting graffiti on buildings, for example, or from skipping school and hanging out on the streets.

Then the researchers took demographic measures such as income and race, rates of victimization and homicide and applied rigorous statistical formulas to determine which was most important in explaining differences in violence among neighborhoods. It turned out to be the residents' willingness to work together, what the researchers called "collective efficacy."

Our study strikes kind of an optimistic note. There's something to work with here," said Dr. Felton Earls, a professor of human behavior and development at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the authors of the report, which appears in today's issue of the journal Science.

To Robert J. Sampson, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and a co-author, "It suggests people can reclaim their neighborhoods." The paper was the first major report coming out of the $5 million-a-year Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, aimed at trying to understand violence and its effects on human development. The project, begun in 1990 and expected to run another seven years, is funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, US Department of Education, and the National Institute of Mental Health.

While the researchers have not yet studied in depth what makes for a more cohesive neighborhood or why some neighborhoods are more cohesive than others, they suggest that such things as local crime watches or community policing might play a role. In fact, Earls said, he suspects such activities in Boston may be helping to play a role in the recent crime reduction here.

"I think it's an impressive piece of research," said John H. Laub, professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University, who has worked with University of Chicago's Sampson on a study that follows career criminals from childhood to late adulthood "There's more to the story of crime than just race, poverty, immigration - a lot of the things that people kick around.

"A lot of what happens in neighborhoods - social cohesion, collective efficacy - really are important," he added. "People need to intervene, people need to take seriously their neighborhoods, even given discrimination and concentrated disadvantage."

But Laub, like the study's authors, cautioned that the findings do not prove that social cohesion actually reduces crime rates, even though the statistics show it accounts for most of the difference in crime rates from neighborhood to neighborhood.

And while the study found examples of low-income neighborhoods with high collective efficacy that had less crime compared with other low-income areas, and high-income neighborhoods with low efficacy that had more crime compared with other high-income areas, poorer neighborhoods still tended to have higher levels of violence than richer neighborhoods.

In other words, social cohesion alone cannot overcome poverty and other social factors that contribute to crime. "It doesn't mean you don't have to worry about income and instability, but if you put your efforts into collective efficacy, the assumption is, one would get a very substantial result," Earls said.

With the nation grappling with major social policies on welfare, public housing, and empowerment zones, the study's authors said they hope their findings can play a role in policymaking.