Community violence occurs primarily in public settings, frequently involves high-risk behaviors such as firearm use, and is often geographically concentrated as a result of racial and economic segregation enforced through policy and practice. Community violence has risen in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina over the past five years, with a plurality of incidents concentrated in neighborhoods which also have high rates of social, economic, and health-related risk factors. This dissertation builds on my work with the City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County as part of a multi-sector collaboration intended to leverage resources and align programs and policies to disrupt, reduce, and prevent community violence. In this dissertation, guided by the Ecological Systems Theory and Social Determinants of Health Framework for Action, I used qualitative, quantitative, photographic, and geospatial data to (1) explore residents’ perceptions of safety and experiences of community violence; (2) describe an integrated, place-based methodology that can be used in community violence research; and (3) explore how positionality informs cross-sector, collaborative data sharing efforts to address community violence.
In study one, participants identified neighborhood features across ecological levels that contributed to them feeling safe or unsafe. Notably, participants perceived historical and on-going disinvestment, enacted through structural racism, as contributing to unsafe conditions. In study two, which grows out of study one, we found that walking interviews generated more findings specific to place and situated within the micro-, meso-, and exosystem levels, while more traditional, semi-structured sedentary interviews yielded results that were largely centered within the individual and microsystem levels. In addition, using an integrated methodology highlighted gaps in the publicly available quantitative data and demonstrated the utility of employing multiple methods to capture data related to place, most notably by generating data that informed actionable insights across ecological levels. In study three, we found that individuals’ and organizations’ social identities (e.g., individuals’ level of data knowledge and data sharing experiences, and organizations’ use of formal data sharing processes) as well as power (specifically, individuals’ sense of empowerment, and organizations’ use of resources and data sharing capacity) interacted to influence barriers and facilitators to data sharing.
Findings point to areas for future research and suggest local implications including (a) the need for increased attention in research and practice related to how structural racism contributes to unsafe neighborhood conditions; (b) the potential benefits of considering how the described integrated, place-based methodology can be scaled to capture residents’ perceptions of safety and experience of violence across neighborhoods; and (c) the salience of attending explicitly to how the positionality of the individual and organization contributes to barriers and facilitators to cross-sector data sharing. Results from my dissertation can be used locally to inform cross-sector, collaborative solutions to community violence that incorporate residents’ perspectives and address risk factors across ecological levels. While conducted in Mecklenburg County, results also have implications for community violence prevention and intervention efforts in communities across the country.