Regional and Racial Effects on the Urban Homicide Rate: The Subculture of Violence Revisited

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the thesis of a "subculture of violence" by examining the realtinships among region, racial composition, and the homicide rate for a sample of 204 Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs). The subcultural thesis has been partly discredited by previous studies based on samples of the American States. These studies report no effect of either region or racial composition on the homicide rate once socioeconomic and democraphic variables have been statistically controlled. My results for SMSAs, however, are quite different. Both southern region and racial composition exhibit appreciable partial effects even with theoretically important controls. The analysis also indicates significant interaction between racial composition and region. For SMSAs outside the South, racial compsition is strongly related to the homicide rate, whereas for southern SMSAs there is no significant relationship between these variables. The paper concludes with some suggestions for future on the subcultural thesis.