The spatial correlation between social capital and crime: A case study of the new town of Pardis, Iran

The crime rate can vary in different geographical areas, and several studies have tried to explain the crime rate by concentrating on the socio-economic characteristics of an environment. The literature on the subject shows a lack of attention to spatial analysis and its relationship which this research attempts to address. The main aim of this study was to investigate the spatial correlation between social capital and crime in the city of Pardis in Iran. A five-point Likert questionnaire survey was conducted among 297 citizens of the new town of Pardis. The survey included 27 questions about the social capital component (trust, attention, awareness) and crime hotspots collected from the police office. A mapping raster layer of both crime and social capital and Band Collection Statistics Tools in ArcGIS were used to show the spatial correlation between crime and social capital. The main findings of this study revealed that there was a statistically significant reverse correlation between social capital and crime in the correlation matrix. The study also illustrated that some of the crime subsets such as fighting (r = -0.74), family conflicts (r = -0.72), and moral crime (r = - 0.62) were more related to social capital than other social capital components in a neighborhood.