The Mujahid et al. (2007) protocol includes three interviewer-administered questions with five-point, Likert-style responses. For each question posed by the interviewer, the respondent reviews the list of responses and chooses the answer that best relates to his or her situation.
1. I feel safe walking in my neighborhood, day or night.
2. Violence is not a problem in my neighborhood.
3. My neighborhood is safe from crime.
A total score can be obtained by computing the average of the three items. Lower scores indicate more neighborhood safety.
The Mujahid et al. (2007) scale was selected for its brevity and because it taps into both feelings about safety and presence of crime. This scale has strong psychometric properties, and prior studies have shown that subjective measures of crime and disorder are correlated with their objective counterparts (Elo et al., 2009). Additionally, objective crime measures (e.g., geocoded police department records, national crime statistics at the neighborhood level) are not uniformly available across the United States.
Mujahid, M. S., Diez Roux, A. V., Morenoff, J. D., & Raghunathan, T. (2007). Assessing the measurement properties of neighborhood scales: From psychometrics to ecometrics. American Journal of Epidemiology, 165, 858-867.
Elo, I. T., Mykyta, L., Margolis, R., & Culhane, J. F. (2009). Perceptions of neighborhood disorder: The role of individual and neighborhood characteristics. Social Science Quarterly, 90, 1039-1422.
Morenoff, J. (2003). Neighborhood mechanisms and the spatial dynamics of birth weight. American Journal of Sociology, 108, 976-1017.
This measure is a questionnaire to assess the respondent’s perceptions about safety and crime in their neighborhoods.
This measure is used to evaluate a respondent’s feelings toward neighborhood-level crime and safety. Studies show that neighborhood safety is relevant to a range of health outcomes, such as birth weight (Morenoff, 2003).