 Societal Violence and Collective ConsciousnessMichael C. Dillbeck and Kenneth L. Cavanaugh SAGE Open, 2016, vol. 6, issue 2, 2158244016637891 Abstract: This research tests the hypothesis that group practice of the Transcendental Meditation® (TM) and TM-Sidhi® program by a group of sufficient size is associated with reduced rates of homicide and violent crime. Data from a prospective quasi-experiment were analyzed using intervention analysis or interrupted time series analysis. Dependent variables are time series of the U.S. monthly homicide rate as well as violent crime rate from a sample of 206 cities. The binary intervention variable is based on the size of the largest U.S. TM-Sidhi group. Intervention effects were analyzed by time series regression using a broken-trend intervention model. As hypothesized, there was a statistically and practically significant shift in trend in the direction of reduced rates for each of the variables beginning with the onset of the intervention period. Diagnostic tests indicate that key statistical assumptions of the analysis are satisfied. Alternative hypotheses are considered for the apparent effect of macro-level social behavioral change without micro-level behavioral interaction. Keywords: crime prevention; crime statistics; public safety; criminology and criminal justice; collective behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:6:y:2016:i:2:p:2158244016637891 Access Statistics for this article More articles in SAGE Open |
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