Collective efficacy is a neighborhood-level concept in which community members create a sense of agency and assume ownership for the state of their local community. This concept is one of several forms of formal and informal social control that predict the overall functioning of a community. In this book, the authors examine collective efficacy and crime in eight Miami-Dade County, Florida neighborhoods, based on data they collected from across the country and in the Miami-Dade neighborhoods themselves. They discuss findings relevant to the theory of collective efficacy itself, ramifications for its use within communities, and make recommendations for future research and for translating these results into actionable, crime prevention activities.

Craig D. Uchida is the president and founder of Justice & Security Strategies, Inc.

Chapter 1: Community, Crime Control, and Collective Efficacy
Chapter 2: Methodology
Chapter 3: Psychometric Properties of the New Collective Efficacy Scale
Chapter 4: The Relationships between Perceptions of Collective Efficacy and Social Cohesion and Outcome Variables
Chapter 5: Assessing Heterogeneity in Perceptions of Collective Efficacy and Social Cohesion across Neighborhoods
Chapter 6: Exploring the Predictors of Perceptions of Collective Efficacy and Perceptions of Social Cohesion
Chapter 7: Within Neighborhood Variation in Collective Efficacy and Social Cohesion
Chapter 8: Conclusions and Discussion for Future Research
Chapter 9: Conclusions and Discussion for Future Policy