Decision Making by Guardians: Factors Affecting the Decision to Intervene

With the preceding chapter having elucidated some of the processes involved in the ‘monitoring’ stage of residential guardianship intensity, the current chapter directs the focus to the ‘intervention’ stage. This chapter illustrates the similarities between the monitoring and intervention stages of residential guardianship, chief of which is that intervening like monitoring is not instinctive but rather requires the willingness to do so on the part of the guardian. With this in mind, this chapter draws on the same interview dataset used in the previous chapter to illustrate the stages involved in a residential guardian's decision to intervene. In doing so, results bring to light some of the most significant factors involved in making the decision to intervene from the resident's perspective. Thus, this chapter attempts to fill one of the gaps in the literature on guardianship by illustrating how guardians make fundamental decisions that are critical to situational crime prevention and how this can inform the crime control effort in residential places. ¹