Collective Efficacy Scale

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.