Social Disorganization Analysis

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.