Where does collective efficacy collide?

A property of a neighborhood: the social cohesion and mutual trust among residents combined with their shared willingness to intervene on behalf of the common good, such as by acting when children skip school or when a fight breaks out on the corner. Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls's 1997 Neighborhoods and violent crime measured it across Chicago tracts and found that this linked capacity for informal social control predicted lower rates of violence once compositional differences were held constant. The referent is a structural trait of a place, informal social control rooted in trust between neighbors, not a mental state held by any one person and not a belief the group has about its own competence.[1]

Unit

A neighborhood's trust and informal social control, as a place-level trait

Recovery means

Erodes with concentrated disadvantage and residential instability, and is rebuilt slowly as trust and durable ties re-form

Measured by

Survey items on neighbor trust and cohesion combined with items on the likelihood neighbors would intervene, aggregated to the neighborhood and modeled hierarchically

A group's shared belief in its conjoint capability to organize and execute the courses of action required to attain given levels of attainment. Bandura's 2000 Exercise of human agency through collective efficacy extended his self-efficacy theory from the person to the collective, arguing that people who work interdependently hold beliefs about the group's operative capabilities, and that these beliefs shape the goals a group sets, how much effort it invests, and its staying power under difficulty. The referent is a perceived capability, an efficacy belief scaled up from the individual to the collective, not a structural feature of a place and not a level of trust between neighbors.[2]

Unit

A group's judgment of its own joint capability to reach a goal

Recovery means

Built and lost through the group's mastery and failure experience, vicarious learning, and persuasion, in the same way individual efficacy is

Measured by

Members rate the group's capability for graded group tasks, aggregated across members, or the group's task performance is judged as a whole

A school faculty's shared belief in the collective capacity of the staff to organize and carry out the actions needed to have a positive effect on students. Goddard, Hoy, and Woolfolk Hoy's 2000 Collective teacher efficacy adapted Bandura's collective-efficacy idea to the school as the unit, built a scale on it, and found that this shared belief predicted differences in student achievement across schools beyond what student background explained. The referent is a faculty's belief about its own teaching capability, a specialization of the group efficacy belief to the school staff, not a trait of the surrounding place and not the trust and informal control that neighbors exercise.[3]

Unit

A school staff's judgment of its collective capacity to affect student learning

Recovery means

Shaped by the staff's mastery experiences with students and by vicarious and persuasory sources, and can be raised or depressed by school leadership and results

Measured by

Teachers rate agreement with items about the faculty's collective capability to teach and reach students, aggregated to the school level