Reisig, D. M. " Parks, B. R. (2000). Experience, Quality of Life, and Neighborhood Context: A Hierarchical Analysis of Satisfaction with Police, Justice Quarterly, 17(3), 607-630
The objectives of this research study were; to test different conceptual frameworks of ‘experience with police,’ ‘neighborhood context’ and ‘quality of life’ for directional accuracy and capability to express satisfaction with the police, and to investigate whether the proposed frameworks help elaborate common findings that African-Americans are greatly dissatisfied with police activities compared to the Caucasians. This is an explanatory research because it seeks to use already available data from the Project on Policing Neighborhoods (POPN) to explain people’s satisfaction levels with the police activities (Reisig " Parks, 2000). The study tested three conceptual models in an attempt to ascertain their ability to explain the common findings that African-Americans were more dissatisfied with police activities than Caucasians hence and explanatory study. This research is an applied study because the already constructed models are applied on identified data. The hierarchical linear modeling is applied through regression to measure clusters of neighborhood- and citizen-level variables. This means that the research tries to answer questions in the real world by using existing models of ‘experience with police,’ ‘neighborhood context’ and ‘quality of life’ to solve practical problems.
The research gathered survey responses from 5,361 citizens living in 58 neighborhoods of Indiana, Indianapolis, and St. Petersburg, Florida. Given that the data was already available, the researchers only opened the database and extracted the relevant data from the POPN data file. The research found that at the citizen level, the psychology-based quality of life model was responsible for the largest proportion of explained variance and supplies the largest directional accuracy. It also found that people living in neighborhoods replete with concentrated disadvantages expressed significant less satisfaction with the police. Moreover, the research revealed that neighborhood context significantly reduced the negative effects of African-American status on satisfaction with police when sparse citizen-level specifications are used. However, racial variations in the satisfaction levels with the police persisted when the citizen-level hierarchical frameworks were fully specified.
References
Reisig, D. M. " Parks, B. R. (2000). Experience, Quality of Life, and Neighborhood Context: A Hierarchical Analysis of Satisfaction with Police, Justice Quarterly, 17(3), 607-630
