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Article: Social Capital and Homicide [*].
- Article from:
- Social Forces
- Article date:
- September 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 University of North Carolina Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Abstract
Despite recent theoretical attention to "social capital" and its impact on a range of public problems, including crime, few studies have evaluated the relationship between crime rates and levels of social capital across populations. That research gap is due, in part, to the absence of macro-level empirical indicators of social capital. In this article, we measure social capital as a latent construct with aggregated voting and organizational membership data, and survey data on social trust, and examine its relationship with homicide rates for a nationally representative sample of geographic areas. Structural equation models show that the construct of ...