Directions for Future Research

This study of juvenile violence in nonmetropolitan communities has successfully extended research on communities and crime beyond urban centers to small cities and rural communities. The themes from social disorganization theory have a broader application to communities of all sizes. Data from nonmetropolitan communities can be especially useful for testing and expanding social disorganization theory because they present different patterns of community variables. For instance, the findings related to poverty and crime suggest that nonmetropolitan communities may provide the setting in which the direct impact of poverty on community disorganization can be determined. Thus, social disorganization and related theories are appropriate starting points for developing either theories of crime specific to rural settings or theories of communities and crime that are general across settings. Developing such theories will require a firm grounding in the modern realities of settings ranging from small cities to isolated farming communities to the suburbs that surround urban cores. For too long, theories of communities and crime have limited their attention to an image of small, dense urban neighborhoods that fully encompass the lives of their inhabitants, and that image is out of sync with life in most communities in the United States today.

Community Correlates of Rural Youth Violence	OJJDP Bulletin • May 2003