| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation investigates the complex relationship between community violence and school environments in Nashville, Tennessee, through the lenses of social disorganization theory and routine activities theory. It comprises three studies that collectively unravel how schools both affect and are affected by the violence in their surrounding neighborhoods. The first study maps the spatial and demographic patterns of community violence, finding consistent spatial distributions across violent crime types with subtle variations in their relative frequencies. It establishes connections between community violence and demographic factors, shedding light on the socio-spatial dynamics of urban violence. The second study assesses how school exposure influences community violence, utilizing inverse distance weighted interpolation and spatial lag regression. The analysis reveals that higher levels of school exposure are associated with decreased surrounding violence, highlighting the potential of schools to act as moderators of community violence. This study also improves upon traditional methods of measuring school exposure, which previously overlooked the number and size of schools proximate to neighborhoods. By incorporating these aspects through two innovative measures, the research offers a refined perspective on the role that the presence and size of schools play in influencing violence in nearby communities. The third study explores how community violence might affect school violence, focusing on the role of neighborhood social cohesion. Through structural equation modeling, it identifies a negative correlation between community violence and school violence, challenging prior assumptions and revealing the complex ways schools respond to community violence. This study also finds that neighborhood social cohesion has suppressive effects on school violence, though the pathways through which this occurs are complex. This dissertation contributes to a deeper understanding of the interplay between schools and their urban contexts regarding violence. It indicates that schools can be an important community resource, capable of buffering against community violence through processes happening inside the school (e.g., student/teacher relationships), and their influence on other processes happening in the community. | |
