Do you see what I see? Perceptual variation in reporting the presence of disorder cues

• Research does not currently explain why perceptions of neighborhood disorder vary.
• We model whether people living on the same block report disorder similarly.
• Within the same block, individuals report seeing different disorder cues.
• Individuals tend to disagree on the presence of disorder, not its absence.
• Reporting disorder is dependent on social, economic, and place-based factors.

A growing body of literature considers the causes of variation in perceptions of disorder; thus far, few explanations are adequate. We ask: when exposed to the same environment, do individuals homogenously report the presence of the same disorder cues? Using a dataset that cluster samples residents within city blocks and hierarchal logistic regression, we assess whether individuals residing within 1–2 blocks of each other report the same disorder cues. We find that (1) there is significant variation in reports, (2) individuals tend to disagree on the presence of disorder, not its absence, and (3) that reporting various disorder cues has significant ties to an individual’s characteristics, their routine activities, and how attached they are to their neighborhood. How individuals report and interpret disorder seems to be dependent on the confluence of social, historical, economic, and place-based factors. Our results suggest revisiting the theorization of how individuals report on and interact with disorder.