Social Forces.Sociologists have speculated that mutual trust and neighborhood surveillance could discourage crime for many years.
However, scientists couldn’t measure how residents keep watch over their neighborhoods. ADVERTISEMENT “We thought that dog walking probably captures that pretty well, which is one reason why we decided to do this study,” study co-author Christopher Browning, a professor of sociology at OSU said.For the research, the team analyzed crime statistics from 2014 to 2016 for 595 neighborhoods in the Columbus, Ohio area.
They gathered data from a marketing firm that asked Columbus residents if they owned a dog in 2013.They also obtained data from the Adolescent Health and Development in Context study (which Browning oversees) to calculate trust in each neighborhood.
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