Results
Residential Instability, Ethnic Diversity, and Family Disruption
In research on social disorganization in urban settings, the three variables most strongly and consistently associated with rates of crime and delinquency are residential instability, ethnic diversity, and family disruption. In the four states in this study, a similar pattern was found in nonmetropolitan counties (see tables 2 and 3).
Social disorganization theory holds that when turnover in the membership of a community is high, social relationships will weaken and juvenile violence will increase. Consistent with this theory, the study data showed that residential instability was significantly associated with higher rates of aggravated assault, simple assault, weapons violations (bivariate relationship only), and the overall Violent Crime Index. This relationship was marginally significant for rape (p < .10 for both estimates). The connection between residential instability and delinquency appears to be quite strong. In the bivariate associations of table 2, a 10-percent increase in residential instability was associated with 29- to 65-percent higher rates of arrest for the various forms of juvenile violence, with the exception of homicide.
Ethnic diversity is also a key variable because cultural differences tend to interfere with adults' ability to work together in supervising and raising their children. The correlation between ethnic diversity and violent offenses was statistically significant in most instances. In the bivariate relationships, a 10-percent increase in ethnic diversity was associated with 20- to 35-percent higher rates of juvenile violence.
The reader may wonder whether the results for ethnic diversity truly reflect diversity or if that variable is merely a proxy for the proportion of minority group members in the population. These variables are too highly correlated to address this question directly by including both in the same model. To gain some perspective on the issue, the authors estimated models that replaced ethnic diversity with the proportion of the population that was nonwhite. The nonwhite percentage was less strongly related to arrest rates, suggesting that diversity is the more important variable.
Higher levels of family disruption, as indexed by the proportion of female-headed households, also were strongly and consistently associated with higher rates of arrest for violent offenses other than homicide. According to social disorganization theory, this pattern arises from the burden of single parenting, which interferes with parents' abilities to work together and reduces the number of adults involved in the joint supervision of children. The relationship between family disruption and juvenile arrest rates was the strongest in the study's results. In the bivariate relationships, this relationship was significant for all offenses except homicide, and in the multivariate relationships, it was significant for all offenses except homicide and robbery. In the bivariate relationships, a 10-percent increase in female-headed households was associated with 73- to 100-percent higher rates of arrest for all offenses except homicide.
In combination, residential instability, ethnic diversity, and family disruption strongly differentiated counties with high rates of arrest from those with low rates. Compare, for example, a county with 35-percent residential instability, ethnic diversity of 0.23 (on a scale of 0 to 0.5), and 13-percent female-headed households, which would be a moderately low level of social disorganization, with one that has 45-percent residential instability, ethnic diversity of 0.33, and 23-percent female-headed households, which would be a moderately high level. The multivariate relationships shown in table 3 (which control for all other explanatory variables) indicate that the arrest rate for the Violent Crime Index in the more disorganized county would be 2 2/3 times as great as that of the less disorganized county (217 per 100,000 versus 81 per 100,000).
Economic Status
The analysis did not find a meaningful relationship between rates of delinquency and rates of poverty.4 Instead of showing poverty to be associated with higher rates of delinquency, the relationships were either very slight or indicated an association between poverty and lower delinquency rates (significantly lower rates for simple assault and rape).
To understand this finding, it is useful to
examine the association between poverty
rates and the other community correlates
of juvenile violence. As research in urban
areas has typically found (Warner and
Pierce, 1993), poverty rates in the study's
nonmetropolitan counties were positively
associated with both ethnic diversity
(r = .48, controlling for state) and the rate
of female-headed households (r = .55).
In contrast to urban areas, however, the
correlation between poverty and residential
instability in these nonmetropolitan
areas was negative rather than positive
(r = –.39). This finding contradicts the
classic pattern of relationships from Park
and Burgess's (1924) theory of urban
ecology, which was the basis for predicting
that poverty would lead to social disorganization. Also in contrast to findings
in urban areas, poverty rates were
higher in nonmetropolitan counties with
smaller populations than in those with
larger populations
(r = –.41). Poverty rates
increase as ethnic diversity and the proportion
of female-headed households increase,
suggesting that delinquency rates
will increase along with poverty rates. However,
this source of positive correlation
between the rates of poverty and delinquency
is canceled out in nonmetropolitan
areas, where rates of poverty are
lower in areas with high residential instability
and larger populations.
This pattern of relationships is consistent with research conducted by Fitchen (1994), who found that poorer residents do not make frequent moves in rural areas. Low-cost housing is often abundant, and residents have a support network of family and friends who can provide casual rent agreements and flexible payment schemes. It appears that—unlike in most urban areas—poverty does not disrupt the social fabric of small towns and rural communities. The reasons that a high rate of rural poverty does not increase the delinquency rate appear to be consistent with social disorganization theory.
Population Size and Density
Arrest rates for juvenile violence varied dramatically with differences in the sizes (and densities) of juvenile populations. The figure illustrates these findings with graphs for four of the studied offenses. For all violent offenses except homicide, differences in the size of county juvenile populations corresponded to differences of at least threefold in juvenile arrest rates. The figure shows that annual arrest rates for juvenile violence were uniformly lower in the rural counties with the smallest populations. Per capita arrest rates rose with increases in juvenile population, but only until the population size reached about 4,000. Beyond this level, increasing population had little impact on arrest rates for violent offenses other than robbery.5 These results are comparable to Laub's (1983b) finding that victimization rates increased with population size for total populations (rather than juvenile populations) up to about 25,000, but did not increase further for larger populations. Arrest rates for the Violent Crime Index, rape, and aggravated assault appeared to decline somewhat in the upper range of juvenile population sizes, but it is unlikely that these decreases are statistically reliable because they are small.
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Proximity to Metropolitan Areas
Whether a rural county was adjacent to a metropolitan area had little bearing on its rate of juvenile arrests for violent offenses. None of the relationships for this explanatory variable approached statistical significance. If delinquency can spread from one community to another, the reason is not simple enough to be explained by the county's proximity to a metropolitan area.
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