Journal Article Review Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Journal Review - Article Example The article has also addressed the interaction terms for poverty and mobility, poverty and heterogeneity, and mobility and heterogeneity are explored as well. The article’s result got from the study holds up the findings from recently carried out victimization studies and earlier studies of ecology using official crime counts. Structural density and family disruption, along with poverty and heterogeneity, are found to be significant ecological variables for mastering the crime rate distribution among neighborhoods (Warner and Glenn, 1993). In this article, social disorganization theory has been addressed intensively. The authors assert that social disorganization was among the prominent theories that explained crime in the earlier stages of this century. This is so because of the theory’s focus on the crime geological distribution of crime and the structural features of the neighborhoods that are related to the crime distribution. The article is also of the position tha t the approach of the ecology the study of crime fell, in the 1970s, out of trend. However, the ecology approach was replaced by more theories of social psychology. The authors say that several reasons for the social disorganization theory decline was in place, especially the devastating criticism that had a lot to do with the reliance of the research carried out on the official crime measures (Warner and Glenn, 1993). The article puts it that although many of the early social disorganization theory empirical examinations got support for its main ideas, the theories depended more on official crime measures (such as juvenile court referrals, arrests, and official counts of crime). It was argued in the article that the official measures of crime had a high likelihood to reflect biases in the official crime reactions because they were intended to reflect true measures of crime. This article viewed crime measures with particular skepticism when applied in relation to the communitiesâ₠¬â„¢ characteristics. Non white and poor neighborhoods were suspected of being vulnerable especially to the inflated crime measures. The article also addresses the empirical support for criticisms provided by recent studies to this study (Warner and Glenn, 1993). Victimization data has also been reviewed in this article. The article asserts that the promise of more accurate social structural effects examination on crime and a social disorganization theory renewed interests came only with the beginning of victimization data. The findings in this article and the data collected enabled for counts of crime separately from any official crime responses, and research social disorganization theory examination using the collected data. The article also says that, though the studies of early victimization explored and examined cities instead of neighborhoods used for the majority of the studies carried out earlier, the findings of these studies nevertheless raised questions concerning conclus ions based on the official data of crime. The results from the studies provided mixed support to the major social disorganization theory variables and questioned particularly the role of poverty. The article reports that Sampson (1985) detailed that mobility and racial composition were related positively to the total personal victimization and that