NEWS How does it affect the neighborhood when the area is designated as a vulnerable area? What effects does it have on health, crime and trust? Jeff Mitchell at the Department of Sociology, together with researchers from Bodö, Stockholm and Malmö, will capture these effects as completely as possible thanks to project funds from FORTE.
Jeff Mitchell from the Department of Sociology answers questions about his new research project “Labeling Neighborhoods: Assessing the neighborhood level impact of vulnerable area designations on health, crime, and trust”.
ImageThe project aims to assess the impact of receiving an 'utsatt område' designation from the Swedish police on the neighborhoods that receive them. To do this we will analyze data from several sources including the Swedish health registers, crime statistics, surveys, and information about civil society organizations which all contain information about these areas both before and after receiving the classification. This will allow us to isolate the effect of receiving a designation and assess the positive and negative impacts that might have occurred as a result.
Yes, the project has four named applicants making up a well-rounded international and multi-disciplinary team. It includes Guilherme Kenji Chihaya, who is at NORD University in Norway but used to work in the Geography department here at Umeå University, Juta Kawalerowicz who is a researcher in the geography department at Stockholm University, and Manne Gerell who is a criminologist at Malmö University.
These areas are, by definition, experiencing challenges which extend into the wider society. But it must be noted that the vulnerable area designation system itself marks a step away from the universalists social policy tradition that has characterized the Swedish social democratic welfare state model toward a particularistic, area based intervention program.
The aim of the project is to assess the effects that vulnerable area designations have on the areas that receive them, and to capture these effects as completely as possible. Area-based policies such as the vulnerable area designations aim to solve challenges and problems occurring in the area and surroundings but, there are signs that there may be unintended negative consequences from these policies. So far there are no systematic assessments of this policy, which means that it operates in an information vacuum. A systematic assessment of the policy’s consequences, such as the one that will be carried out by this project, is absolutely necessary because the potential risk being harmed by area designations if there are unintended negative consequences for health, crime, and social cohesion in different communities.
This is hard to predict, we know from previous research that labeling specific areas as problematic can create stigma about them, especially when those labels are well publicized as has been the case with the 'utsatt område' designations. This stigma can lead to long term negative impacts, as I have shown in some previous research in the U.S. context. If this is the case then we would expect worsening outcomes for the health of the residents, increased crime, and lower levels of social cohesion (including trust in the police). On the other hand, the increased resources and police attention that come with the designations may disrupt criminal activity and provide these areas with the things they need to see improvements in health, reduced crime and increased social cohesion. How exactly this has played out remains an open question we wish to address.
This project contributes to some of the existing strengths of the department (e.g. survey and register based research), but it also marks an expansion into criminology – an area of priority for the department as we build up the criminology program that is housed in the sociology department. I think that this project will make a large contribution to the department in that regard, adding to the growing criminological research competence that we have here.
The biggest challenge in a project like this is always assessing the causal effects of receiving a designation. However, a strength of this project is that there was a large amount of subjective variation in terms of which areas were and were not classified as vulnerable. That means that we can view the assignment of a designation as an exogenous event and use it as a treatment, to be compared with those areas that were very similar but did not receive a designation. Together with very high-quality data, we believe that our research will provide the most complete picture possible of the impact that this program has had neighborhoods in Sweden.
I anticipate that the most fun part will be working with the other fantastic researchers that are on the project. The researchers are really good at what they do, and it will be a privilege to get to work with them and learn from them in the coming years.
