Compare methods

	Collective Efficacy Scale	Self-Report Delinquency Scale
Field	Criminology	Criminology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1997	1980
Originator	Robert J. Sampson, Stephen W. Raudenbush & Felton Earls	Delbert S. Elliott & Suzanne S. Ageton
Type	Ecometric measurement scale of neighborhood social cohesion and informal social control	Self-report behavioral measurement instrument
Seminal source	Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S. W., & Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science, 277(5328), 918–924.	Elliott, D. S., & Ageton, S. S. (1980). Reconciling race and class differences in self-reported and official estimates of delinquency. American Sociological Review, 45(1), 95–110.
Aliases	Collective Efficacy Measure, Neighborhood Collective Efficacy Scale, Sampson Collective Efficacy Scale, Social Cohesion and Informal Control Scale	SRD Scale, Self-Reported Delinquency Measure, Self-Report Offending Inventory, National Youth Survey Delinquency Scale
Related	3	4
Summary	The collective efficacy scale measures a neighborhood's shared capacity to maintain order: the combination of social cohesion and mutual trust among residents with their shared willingness to intervene for the common good. Introduced by Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls in their landmark 1997 Science study, it operationalizes a reformulation of social disorganization theory and is constructed with ecometric methods that aggregate individual survey responses into reliable neighborhood-level scores.	A self-report delinquency (SRD) scale measures offending by asking respondents directly how often they have committed specific delinquent or criminal acts, rather than relying on arrests or convictions. The modern frequency-based approach was established by Delbert Elliott and Suzanne Ageton in 1980 for the National Youth Survey, designed to capture the full range and frequency of offending and to overcome the biases of official crime records.