Compare methods

	Collective Efficacy Scale	Social Disorganization Analysis
Field	Criminology	Criminology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1997	1942
Originator	Robert J. Sampson, Stephen W. Raudenbush & Felton Earls	Clifford R. Shaw & Henry D. McKay
Type	Ecometric measurement scale of neighborhood social cohesion and informal social control	Ecological theory and analysis of neighborhood structural sources of crime
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.	Sampson, R. J., & Groves, W. B. (1989). Community structure and crime: Testing social-disorganization theory. American Journal of Sociology, 94(4), 774–802.
Aliases	Collective Efficacy Measure, Neighborhood Collective Efficacy Scale, Sampson Collective Efficacy Scale, Social Cohesion and Informal Control Scale	Social Disorganization Theory, Shaw and McKay Model, Neighborhood Social Disorganization Analysis, Community Structure and Crime Analysis
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.	Social disorganization analysis explains why crime concentrates in some neighborhoods regardless of who lives there, tracing it to community structural conditions rather than individual pathology. Building on Shaw and McKay's classic Chicago studies, it argues that poverty, residential instability, and ethnic heterogeneity undermine a neighborhood's capacity for informal social control, which in turn raises crime and delinquency — a chain that Sampson and Groves later tested empirically with survey-based measures of community social ties.