This paper examines the relationship between income inequality and the homicide rate in 59 geographic areas in New York City known as Community District Tabulation Areas (CDTAs). The premise for this paper is that community members in each CDTA share similar social characteristics and therefore these areas provide a useful lens through which to analyze ecological social phenomena such as homicide. The main hypothesis for this paper is that the homicide rate in the CDTAs will vary directly with the level of income inequality within each CDTA. The outputs from several models testing this hypothesis do not support this hypothesis. The models failed to produce a result showing a relationship between income inequality and the homicide rate that is statistically significant. However, the models did produce results showing a strong relationship between a composite of several indicators of disadvantage and the homicide rate in the CDTAs. The model also produces results that show a moderate relationship between the homicide rate and the racial makeup of CDTAs along with a moderate inverse relationship between voter turnout and the homicide rate. / Master of Science / The causes behind fluctuations in violence rates has been the subject of much scholarship over the past several decades. Policymakers can use the results of these studies to design effective intervention programs. This study investigates to what extent there is a link between inequality and the homicide rate in New York City. This study uses several social theories such as social disorganization, strain theory, and collective efficacy to analyze homicide rates in 59 geographic areas throughout New York City known as Community District Tabulation Areas (CDTA). I use data from several sources to form variables that represent social phenomena in each CDTA, such as relative disadvantage, absolute disadvantage, and collective efficacy. I then explore the relationships between these variables against the homicide rate in each CDTA. This study concludes with findings on the relationships and discussion about the results.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/119463 |
| Date | 16 May 2024 |
| Creators | Reed, Daryl W. |
| Contributors | Sociology, Hawdon, James E., Dearden, Thomas E., Zhu, Haiyan |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf, application/pdf, application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document |
| Rights | CC0 1.0 Universal, http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ |
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