Abstract
Ralph Taylor’s Community Criminology: Fundamentals of Spatial and Temporal Scaling, Ecological Indicators, and Selectivity Bias is an appeal to communities and crime scholars to diversify both theoretically and methodologically to improve upon what Taylor sees as the stagnant state of the community criminology literature:
We are still getting too excited about things we knew ninety years ago. Some ideas keep returning, and some study designs keep recurring, but they are not helping to solve some of the most fundamental riddles in this area: understanding how context works, understanding how agency works, and putting this together properly in a situated and longitudinal context, across a range of spatial and temporal scales.
Taylor asserts that, despite decades of calls to do so by leading criminological scholars, extant research is missing the big picture: integration across individual, mesosocial, and macrosocial factors. Taylor acknowledges that doing so is “analytically and theoretically demanding” (p. 3) and offers his text in response to these difficulties. Community Criminology is anchored by four fundamental challenges related to space, time, construct validity, and selection effects that community criminologists must address in order to progress theoretically. His first two chapters lay the groundwork. In Chapter 1, he introduces the reader to the methodological holism/individualism debate and the Boudon-Coleman (“boat”) metamodel as heuristics for organizing micro, meso, and macro connections and topics that undergird the subsequent chapters.
Chapter 2 is a deeper investigation into the concept of “community crime rates” and the mechanisms that produce community rates of delinquency, offending, and victimization. According to Taylor, community criminologists’ “zombie-like tenacity of strict operationism” (p. 27) leads scholars to accept official crime statistics without investigating the processes that generate those numbers. Taylor encourages scholars to think more broadly about community-level crime indicators. He provides some direction to do so by describing three community crime sequences that connect ecological processes to the influence of individual dynamics and criminal justice agency actions. In doing so, Taylor incorporates a volume of existing literature, the extensiveness of which sometimes makes for an exhausting read. Appreciably, Taylor is sufficiently self-aware to provide a precursory warning to Chapter 2’s considerable length (p. 21).
The next seven chapters delve into the theoretical and measurement challenges of the four fundamental issues that have “blocked theoretical integration in community criminology” (pp. 4–5). Chapter 3 is an “orientating toolkit” (p. 102) in which Taylor introduces the reader to the importance of geographic space and spatial scaling for thinking about theory. In a strategy that is particularly helpful, he uses two historical and one recent community criminological research examples to illustrate the different interpretations of ecological relationships between scholars who embody methodological individualism from those who assume holistic or invariant relationships across spatial scales. Taylor continues to refer to these three examples throughout the rest of the text.
The following two chapters return to the boat metamodel as a “vehicle for metatheorizing about community criminology” (p. 22). Much of Chapter 4 is dedicated to understanding how spatial adjacency effects (spatial autocorrelation) fit within Taylor’s modified boat metamodel. This is the first chapter to really synchronize analytic strategy with theory. In Chapter 5, Taylor applies the boat metamodel to criminology of place (the meso-level). Here, Taylor contrasts the usefulness of examining micro-places or hot spots for short-term crime control to the inability of such approaches to garner a deeper theoretical understanding of ecological patterns of crime. Taylor closes this chapter by reminding the reader that investigation into the causes of crime in communities requires integration across levels of analysis and necessitates placing “whodunit” within “wheredunit” (p. 145).
According to Taylor, the role of time in community criminology has been undertheorized, overlooked, or interpreted inappropriately and he likens this temporal confusion in extant theories to Rip van Winkle’s disorientation after a two-decade nap. Taylor notes that although he presents spatial and temporal scaling separately to facilitate understanding of the issues, treating temporal scaling as separate from spatial scaling is an “artificial distinction” (p. 201) that should be “put aside” in future research. In Chapter 6, Taylor uses a perspective of methodological holism to examine temporal scaling issues and the implications for three different, but widely used, data structures (cross-sectional, covarying changes, and lagged change). In Chapter 7, Taylor attempts to provide some clarity by expanding earlier boat metamodels to incorporate the role of changes across time. Taylor identifies some specific approaches to longitudinal analysis and uses prior studies to walk the reader through the ways in which time matters. His overuse of abbreviations and equations, however, requires the reader to pay close attention in order to follow what is going on (this critique is also applicable to the next two chapters).
Taylor next addresses the last two challenges to theoretical integration: construct validity in Chapter 8 and selectivity bias in Chapter 9. In Chapter 8, Taylor argues that semantic ambiguity or confusion about the ways that key concepts should be defined and operationalized is problematic for comparison across models or between theories. He specifies that “indicator/concept mismatch” is particularly troublesome for empirical tests of social disorganization and routine activities theories; a problem that, until rectified, is “like using a rubber ruler for measurements” (p. 261). In the penultimate chapter, Taylor addresses the “thorniest problem of all: selection effects” (p. 23). In this chapter, he identifies different types of selection effects and attempts to work them into the boat metamodel. Much of the chapter is dedicated to describing three approaches to the issue of selection and addressing selection bias. While one of the longer and more complicated chapters, Taylor links each specific approach to published works which helps the reader put Taylor’s sometimes abstract descriptions into context.
In the final chapter, Taylor brings the reader back to the crucial challenge: integrating theory across levels of explanation, and ultimately, across disciplines and with outside criminal justice agencies. In sum, Taylor is challenging community criminologists to leave their comfort zones, and argues that community criminology can only move forward theoretically and be capable of providing pragmatic policy advice if the challenges that he spent his book describing are addressed. It is worth noting, however, that while Taylor’s text is exceptionally detailed and in-depth, the density and intricacy of information presented may be beyond the grasp of many graduate students and may be more beneficial to scholars already immersed in the field. Indeed, Taylor even closes Community Criminology by providing a career roadmap for an ambitious tenured professor.