Community Crime Prevention and Intimate Violence in Chicago, 1995-1998 (ICPSR 3437)

Time Period(s) View help for Time Period(s)

Date of Collection View help for Date of Collection

Data Collection Notes View help for Data Collection Notes

Hide

Study Purpose View help for Study Purpose

Intimate violence is seldom a single event, but rather a continuing relationship punctuated by verbal and physical abuse. Empirical evidence indicates that previous violent events cumulate to determine the development of each succeeding event, though escalation is not inevitable. Efforts at prevention or intervention, if they are to be effective, must take into account not just one event or circumstance, but also the pattern of repetition. These violent events take place at a location. That location lies within a neighborhood context. Research has suggested that a neighborhood's collective efficacy and capacity to solve problems are linked to neighborhood violence. Collective efficacy and community capacity are each a "social good" -- a resource for the entire neighborhood, derived from the social interaction of neighborhood residents. Community capacity to solve problems includes collective efficacy as well as social resources that result from neighborhood organizations and the neighborhood's clout in the city. There are many avenues through which a woman's neighborhood can provide resources and support for help-seeking and the reduction of violence. They include, but go beyond, the physical availability and cultural accessibility of nearby support services. Intervention from a public health, public safety, or helping agency may not be sufficient or even necessary for a woman to escape a dangerous situation. Formal interventions occur in a context of interventions initiated by the woman herself with the support of natural helping networks. Research indicates that an abused woman's ability to mobilize social control effectively is an interactive process related to her resources and individual situation, as well as to the availability of services. Therefore, support from informal social networks may be as vital as support from formal community services. The vast majority of research on collective efficacy and violence has focused on street crime, not on violence committed within the family. The few studies that exist suggest that, when a neighborhood enjoys greater collective efficacy, the violence-reduction benefits may accrue not only to those who are victimized on the street or in public places, but also to those who are victimized behind closed doors. However, because of methodological limitations in those studies, it is difficult to examine the processes underlying the association. To study the effect of the neighborhood context on an abused woman's ability to escape further violence, it is necessary to follow the experiences of individual abused women over time. Though many agree that analysis of the contextual effect of the community on an abused woman's help-seeking and on violence reduction is sorely needed, such an analysis is not simple. It requires longitudinal data on women being physically abused by an intimate partner, and data on the efficacy and capacity of the neighborhoods where each woman lives. Together, the Chicago Women's Health Risk Study (CWHRS) and the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) evaluation can provide this information. This study sought to answer the question: If a woman is experiencing intimate partner violence, does the collective efficacy and community capacity of her neighborhood facilitate or erect barriers to her ability to escape violence, other things being equal? To address this question, longitudinal data on a sample of 210 abused women from the CHICAGO WOMEN'S HEALTH RISK STUDY, 1995-1998 (ICPSR 3002) were combined with community context data for each woman's residential neighborhood taken from the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) evaluation, LONGITUDINAL EVALUATION OF CHICAGO'S COMMUNITY POLICING PROGRAM, 1993-2000 (ICPSR 3335).

Study Design View help for Study Design

This study linked two unique Chicago datasets, (1) the CHICAGO WOMEN'S HEALTH RISK STUDY (CWHRS) (ICPSR 3002) and (2) the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) evaluation. The CWHRS was designed to give nurses, beat officers, and other primary support people information they need in order to help women experiencing violence at the hands of an intimate partner to lower their risk of life-threatening injury or death. The CWHRS was designed around the comparison of a sample of all intimate partner homicides involving a woman aged 18 or older that occurred in Chicago over a two-year period, and a clinic/hospital sample of detailed, longitudinal interviews with women sampled as they came into hospitals and clinics in Chicago neighborhoods in which the risk for intimate partner violence was high. The purpose of the CAPS evaluation was to evaluate the long-term organizational transition of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) to a community policing model. CAPS is an ambitious plan to reorganize the CPD, restructure its management, redefine its mission, and forge a new relationship between police and city residents. From its inception, the CAPS evaluation included important geographic components. Information from a number of sources, including the Census, police reports, traffic, schools, and housing, was geocoded into area boundaries that were consistently maintained throughout the evaluation period, and the datasets collected by the evaluation were also geocoded into the same boundaries. The CAPS evaluation conducted citywide random-digit dialing surveys of city residents in English or Spanish. Because the residential address of each CAPS survey respondent could be geocoded, CAPS survey data were available for almost all larger areas (such as Chicago community areas or police districts) and for many smaller areas (such as police beats). From the CWHRS study, researchers used only the clinic/hospital sample. From the CAPS evaluation, researchers used (1) the geographic database including Census data, crime indicators, neighborhood disorder, and voter turnout, and (2) neighborhood collective efficacy and community capacity data from the citywide surveys that the CAPS evaluation conducted annually from 1995 to 1998. The CAPS evaluation surveys also were the source for three of the four community context indicators used in the combined dataset -- informal social control, organizational involvement, and station protest (one of the two downtown connections indicators). The second downtown connections indicator, voter turnout, is from the CAPS geographic database. The unit of analysis for the combined dataset is the individual abused woman, not the neighborhood. The study takes the point of view of a woman standing at a street address and looking around her. The characteristics of the small geographical area immediately surrounding her residential address form the community context for that woman. Although there may be similarities among women living in the same neighborhood or in neighborhoods with similar community contexts, each woman responds to her context in a unique way, depending on her individual situation. To link each woman to the community where she was living at the time of the initial CWHRS interview, researchers geocoded her residential address (determined its longitude and latitude) at the initial interview. It was then possible to overlay the woman's geocoded address on a Chicago map showing various area boundaries, such as Chicago community areas, census tracts, census block groups, Chicago police districts, and Chicago police beats. Researchers were therefore able to determine the area in which each woman was living at the time of the initial CWHRS interview. Researchers evaluated a large variety of alternative area definitions for residential neighborhood and chose the police beat as the best, because it is the smallest Chicago area for which the most reliable and complete data are available. The characteristics of the woman's police beat then became the community context for each woman.

Sample View help for Sample

Convenience sampling.

Universe View help for Universe

Abused women aged 18 or older living in Chicago, Illinois.

Unit(s) of Observation View help for Unit(s) of Observation

Data Source View help for Data Source

Data Type(s) View help for Data Type(s)

Description of Variables View help for Description of Variables

Demographic variables include the race, ethnicity, age, marital status, income, and level of education of the woman and the abuser. The beat, district, and community area of the woman's address are present. Neighborhood-level variables (for police beats) include voter turnout percentage, organizational involvement, percentage of households on public aid, percentage of housing that was vacant, percentage of owned units, percentage of feminine poverty households, assault rate, and drug crimes rate. Individual-level variables include the Social Support Network (SSN) scale, language the interview was conducted in, Harass scale score, Power and Control score, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) diagnosis, and other data pertaining to the woman's emotional and physical health. Also included are details about the woman's household, such as whether she was homeless, the number of people living in the household and details about each person, the number of her children or other children in the household, details of any of her children not living in her household, and any changes in the household structure over the past year. Help-seeking in the past year includes whether the woman had sought medical care, had contacted the police, or had sought help from an agency or counselor, and whether she had an order of protection. Several variables reflect whether the woman left or tried to leave the relationship in the past year. Finally, the dataset includes summary variables about violent incidents in the past year (severity, recency, and frequency), and in the follow-up period.

Response Rates View help for Response Rates

Not applicable

Presence of Common Scales View help for Presence of Common Scales

Several Likert-type scales were used as well as the Medical Outcomes Study (MOS) scale of depression (Hayes et al., 1995, Stewart et al., 1988), the Power and Control scale (Johnson, 1996), the HARASS scale of stalking and harassment (Sheridan, 1998), a modified version of the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) (Johnson, 1996), the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Symptom Scale (Foa et al., 1993), the Campbell Danger Assessment (Campbell, 1993), and the Social Support Network (SSN) scale (Block et al., 2000).

Hide

Original Release Date View help for Original Release Date

2003-01-31

Version History View help for Version History

Hide