Exploring Collective Efficacy in Online Neighborhoods

I-Ching Jen

Advisor: Charlotte Gill, PhD, Department of Criminology, Law and Society

Committee Members: Beidi Dong, David Weisburd, Joshua Hinkle

Online Location, #Online
March 26, 2026, 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM

Abstract:

Online neighborhood platforms have increasingly become part of everyday neighborhood life, providing one way through which some users share local information and address neighborhood issues, particularly those related to safety and risk. For neighborhood criminology, this development raises questions about how classic neighborhood frameworks apply in online settings, where users may be repeatedly exposed to place-based safety information and where coordination or intervention can occur through posts. This dissertation explores whether social disorganization theory and collective efficacy theory can be extended to online neighborhoods by focusing on the Ring app.
In this dissertation, I treat collective efficacy as an informal social control capacity that reflects both social cohesion and a shared willingness to intervene. Online collective efficacy is measured using observable cues in user generated posts on the Ring app from 2016 to 2020, aggregated to 447 Los Angeles census tract units, rather than relying only on survey based measures. The platform posts are then integrated with neighborhood structural variables from the American Community Survey and calls for service data from the Los Angeles Police Department for subsequent analyses.

The findings suggest that classic neighborhood theories do not show fully consistent patterns in online neighborhoods. For the first research question, neighborhood structural characteristics, including concentrated disadvantage, residential instability, and racial heterogeneity, are not significantly associated with census tract level online collective efficacy. For the second research question on online fear of crime, online collective efficacy does not reduce fear expressions in posts as expected. Instead, the association is positive and statistically significant, indicating that tracts with higher online collective efficacy tend to show higher online fear of crime. This pattern may reflect that on a safety oriented online neighborhood platform such as Ring, posts that coordinate responses or involve intervention are often written in the context of crime or safety related risk issues, and therefore also contain substantial risk related information. Finally, the third research question indicates a more stable link between online collective efficacy and offline outcomes. After accounting for structural controls, higher online collective efficacy is associated with fewer calls for service. The incidence rate ratio is consistently below 1, about 0.94 to 0.95, suggesting that a one standard deviation increase in online collective efficacy corresponds to about a 5% to 6% decrease in the expected volume of calls for service.

Overall, the findings suggest that social disorganization and collective efficacy frameworks can be extended to online neighborhood spaces to some extent. Although the expected links between structural characteristics and online collective efficacy are not clearly supported at the tract level, online collective efficacy is related to both safety-related outcomes examined here. It is positively associated with online fear of crime and negatively associated with calls for service. These results suggest that online neighborhood posts may reflect observable cues consistent with informal social control and coordination that are relevant to both online and offline outcomes.