Measuring Community (Dis)Organizational Processes through Key Informant Analysis

Abstract

The role of community (dis)organizational processes is a major issue in contemporary criminology. As a consequence, researchers have been increasingly eager to measure community-level social mechanisms such as social trust and disorder. However, community inhabitants are predominantly used to measure community (dis)organizational processes. This approach requires large numbers of respondents to generate reliable and valid measures of social trust and disorder. In this article, the use of expert key informants is discussed as an alternative method of measuring community processes. Our findings suggest that key informants can provide reliable and valid measures of social cohesion and disorder on two rather small units of analysis.