The comparative context of collective efficacy: understanding neighbourhood disorganization and willingness to intervene in Seattle and Brisbane

The collective efficacy literature provides a framework to understand how neighbourhood structure influences violence. Existing findings have been based largely on American cities where disadvantage and ethnic segregation are more concentrated. Thus, they are not always representative of other Western cities where structural disadvantage has a different history as well as less variation across neighbourhoods. This paper explores the comparative effect of collective efficacy in Seattle, USA, and Brisbane, Australia. Findings show that collective efficacy is a significant predictor of violent victimisation in both cities. However, in Brisbane, traditional measures of structural disorganisation are less of an influence on victimisation than in Seattle, and that collective efficacy as a neighbourhood process can exist and vary across neighbourhoods without extreme disorganisation