JOURNAL ARTICLE ADDRESSES IMPACT OF PUBLIC LAND USE ON COMMUNITY SAFETY

Do you feel safe? Recent study concludes if you live near a business or playground your perception of community safety is more likely to be one of high risk and that perception may just be a reflection of reality.

McKendree College, Lebanon, Ill. --- Do you feel safe? If you live near a business or playground your perception of community safety is more likely to be one of high risk and that perception may just be a reflection of reality.

That is the finding of the authors of "The Built Environment and Community Crime Risk Interpretation," an article published in the August issue of The Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. The journal is a quarterly, peer-reviewed publication that advances theory and knowledge on crime and justice.

Neil Quisenberry, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology at McKendree College in Lebanon, Ill., is one of the three authors of the journal article that examined whether subjective perceptions of community safety are impacted by the built environment (i.e. schools, playgrounds, businesses, parks.) "The findings indicate that the neighborhood-level presence of businesses and parks and playgrounds increases individual perceptions of community danger," said Quisenberry, who completed his doctoral studies at the University of Kentucky. "We focused our research on neighborhood-level factors that affect crime risk perception, particularly those related to understudied public land use," Quisenberry said and added that this effect disappears once neighborhood crime rates are controlled. What this suggests is that actual crime rates in a neighborhood determine fear levels rather than the presence of parks and playgrounds. This finding indicates that individuals are fairly realistic in assessing the level of danger in any particular neighborhood. An interesting finding in the research showed that "the presence of schools has no effect on subjective interpretations of community crime, when in fact the presence of a school has been shown to increase the rate of violent crime in a neighborhood," Quisenberry said.

In addition to his doctorate in sociology/criminology from the University of Kentucky, Lexington, Ky., Quisenberry has a bachelors degree in sociology from Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Ky. and a master of arts degree in sociology from the University of South Florida (Tampa). Quisenberry is a resident of Shiloh, Ill.

McKendree College is a top-ranked, liberal-arts college -- with its main campus located in historic Lebanon, Ill., in the metropolitan St. Louis area. McKendree offers its students a contemporary, well-rounded educational experience, taught in a caring and classic environment. McKendree is the oldest college in the state of Illinois, founded in the year 1828.