ABSTRACT
The majority of delinquency studies, including those most often cited as relevant to the discourse between theory and data, follow sampling and/or analytical procedures which treat individuals as the only unit of analysis and focus almost exclusively on the individual’s primary group relationships. Two dimensions, Neighborhood Level of Family Disorganization and Neighborhood Social Rank, successfully accounted for most of the between-neighborhood variance in rates of official delinquency. Social theories of crime and delinquency developed earlier in the century were closely linked to contemporaneous developments in sociology which attempted to explain processes of change associated with urbanism. Discussion begins with a delineation of community dimensions associated with structural demographically defined parameters, but which are postulated to represent contextual effects on adolescent deviant behavior. In moving from explaining differences on the aggregate level to explaining contextual effects on individual behavior, the theory leaves room for more than one interpretation.
