Avoiding violent victimization among youths in urban neighborhoods: the importance of street efficacy.

Objectives: We investigated how street efficacy--the perceived ability to avoid dangerous and unsafe situations--is related to violent victimization across different levels of neighborhood disadvantage.

Methods: We used 2 waves of self-report data collected between 1995 and 1999 from 1865 youths in the 9-, 12-, and 15-year-old cohorts of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods to measure violent victimization, street efficacy, and risk factors for violent victimization. We also analyzed data from the 1990 US Census to measure categories of neighborhood concentrated disadvantage for which the cohorts of youths reside. We used logistic regression models to examine the association between street efficacy and violent victimization while we controlled for demographic, family and parenting, self-control, and behavioral and lifestyle variables.

Results: Logistic regression results showed that street efficacy had its strongest association with violent victimization in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods (odds ratio = 0.700; 95% confidence interval = 0.55, 0.89).

Conclusions: Our findings support the need to teach youths ways to successfully navigate potentially violent situations in environments that pose moderate to high risks for exposure to violence.