Empirical Support For The Systemic Social Disorganization Model

Essay Prompt: Describe the level of empirical support (or non-support) for the systemic model, as provided by this week’s readings.
In order to test the systemic social disorganization model, various scholars had done quite a few empirical researches and revealed different results, some of which supported the principle of the systemic model, while others did not. The basic idea of the “systemic social disorganization model” is, the exogenous sources of social disorganization, i.e., economic status, ethnic heterogeneity and residential mobility and so on, will show effect on the crime and delinquency by influencing the intervening character, informal social control.
In 1997, Warner and Wilcox used data on 100 Seattle census tracts to test the intervening influence of local social ties, as the informal social control, on relationship between community structure conditions (poverty, heterogeneity and mobility) and burglary and assault rates. The results were quite fruitful and enlightening. Their findings showed that local

The results showed that dense social network could convey both positive and negative effects on formal and informal social control. Legitimate residents’ network would enhance the informal supervision while gang members and drug dealers would undermine the legality of the community through their social networks. In Pattillo’s own words: “Neighborhood social organization does not exist as an absolute value, but represents a continuum, the ends of which are complete chaos or utopia (pp.770).” Many times, our communities are swinging between these two extremes, and it is our responsibility to further study, though with difficulties, the mechanism behind this intricate relationship, for the sake of promoting our society and protecting it from “the living