2  Executive Summary

The Kansas City Community Survey project conducted in Kansas City, Missouri, employed community members as interviewers to understand residents’ perceptions of neighborhood safety, collective efficacy, and police-community relations among other community-level factors. The project pursued methodological advancement in community research by reaching populations typically underrepresented in traditional municipal surveys while maintaining scientific rigor.

2.1 Key Methodological Innovations

  • Community-Engaged Data Collection: The project demonstrated that community-based interviewing can simultaneously achieve high data quality standards and reach underrepresented populations. The approach successfully engaged 88 residents from high-crime neighborhoods (22.8% of sample), compared to only 17 residents (6.5%) in the traditional KC Resident Survey. This represents a five-fold improvement in representation and nearly eliminates geographic sampling disparities. (See Sampling Disparities section 7.0.5.)

  • Rigorous Quality Assurance: Comprehensive duplication analysis revealed minimal data quality issues, with only one case of true duplication among 386 responses and no evidence of systematic fabrication, validating the community-based methodology. (See Duplicates Check Conclusions section 4.0.4.)

  • Advanced Analytical Approaches: The analysis employed ordinal modeling techniques, item-level analysis, and bivariate spatial mapping throughout to provide more nuanced insights than traditional scale-based approaches.

2.2 Major Findings

2.2.1 Collective Efficacy Theory

The study provides support for collective efficacy theory while revealing important refinements:

  • Component Analysis: Social control showed stronger and more consistent relationships with crime outcomes than social cohesion, suggesting informal social control may be more central to crime prevention. (See Bivariate Manhattan Plots section 5.0.7.)

  • Item-Level Insights: Specific dimensions, particularly trust-related aspects of social cohesion and willingness to intervene in clearly problematic situations, drive relationships with crime perceptions more than others. (See Item-total Correlations section 5.0.6 and Bivariate Manhattan Plots section 5.0.7.)

  • Threshold Effects: Many relationships showed diminishing returns at higher levels of collective efficacy, suggesting neighborhood thresholds or “tipping points” at which low control or cohesion might become particularly problematic. (See Bivariate Mosaic Plots section 5.0.4.)

2.2.2 Geographic Patterns

Spatial analysis revealed clear clustering patterns across Kansas City neighborhoods (See Mapping Survey Data section 6.0.5.):

  • High collective efficacy concentrated in northern and western parts of the city.

  • Lower collective efficacy clustered in south and eastern areas, particularly around the central business district.

  • Crime alignment: Geographic patterns largely aligned with both official crime statistics and residents’ perceptions of safety.

2.2.3 Perceptions vs. Reality

The analysis describes important patterns in how residents perceive crime (See Crime Rate & Survey Data section 6.0.6.3):

  • Accurate violent crime perception: Residents appeared to accurately perceive violent crime (high and low rates) in their neighborhoods.

  • Context matters: Most neighborhoods showed consistency between official violent crime rates and residents’ perceived violence and expected victimization risks. Yet, in several neighborhoods with moderate to high official violent crime rates, residents reported low perceived violence and low expected victimization risks, while a few neighborhoods exhibited the opposite pattern (low official violence rates and moderate to high perceived violence and expected victimization).

2.3 Survey Methodology Validation

Comparison with Kansas City’s annual resident survey demonstrated remarkable consistency (See Comparing Survey Results section 7.0.6 and Comparing Estimation section 7.0.7):

  • Police services: Nearly identical response patterns on measures of police effectiveness, community relations, and response times, with minimal differences between neighborhood types within the Community Survey.

  • Community perceptions: Community survey respondents reported slightly higher satisfaction with quality of life indicators.

  • Geographic validity: When accounting for neighborhood location, the two surveys produced highly consistent results.

2.4 Broader Contributions

2.4.1 For Municipal Research

The project provides a blueprint for improving representativeness in municipal surveys while maintaining comparability with existing instruments. The methodology could be particularly valuable for research on sensitive topics where trust and rapport are essential.

2.4.2 For Neighborhood Interventions

Item-level findings offer potential guidance for targeted community-building efforts:

  • Focus on building trust and addressing interpersonal conflict.
  • Develop capacity for intervention in clearly problematic situations.
  • Strengthen informal networks supporting both social cohesion and collective action.

2.4.3 For Police-Community Relations

The consistency in police-related measures across survey methods suggests these perceptions are reliable indicators for policy development, with geographic variation providing guidance for targeted interventions.

2.5 Broader Contributions

The project provides a blueprint for improving representativeness in municipal surveys while maintaining comparability with existing instruments. Specifically, the results of the project offer the following contributions to future research.

Democratic Research: The project demonstrates how methodological innovation can advance both scientific and democratic objectives by ensuring research serves communities as well as academic purposes.

Capacity Building: Beyond research contributions, the approach builds local research capacity and demonstrates community empowerment through participatory methodology.

Scalability: The Kansas City model provides a framework that other municipalities could adapt for investigating police-community relations, neighborhood safety, and civic engagement.

2.6 Limitations and Future Directions

The analysis acknowledges several limitations including small neighborhood sample sizes creating uncertainty in estimates, cross-sectional design limiting causal inference, and potential methodological effects on response patterns. Future research directions include longitudinal analysis, intervention evaluation, cross-city comparison, and deeper mechanism analysis.

2.7 Conclusion

The Kansas City Community Survey project successfully demonstrates that community-engaged research can bridge the gap between rigorous social science and authentic community participation. By maintaining high scientific standards while successfully engaging previously excluded populations, the project provides both methodological tools and substantive insights that can inform more effective and equitable approaches to urban governance and community development. The findings advance collective efficacy theory, validate community-based research methodologies, and offer practical guidance for policy interventions aimed at building safer, more cohesive neighborhoods.