Building on the insights of the self-efficacy literature, this study highlights that collective efficacy is a collective perception that comes from a process.

Also, this study emphasizes that 1) there is updating, as there are feedback effects from success or failure by the group to the perception of collective efficacy, and 2)

this updating raises the importance of accounting for members’ degree of uncertainty regarding neighborhood collective efficacy.

More so, using a sample of 113 block groups in three rural North Carolina counties, this study finds evidence of updating as neighborhoods perceiving more crime or disorder reported less collective efficacy at the next time point.

Furthermore, collective efficacy was only associated with lower perceived disorder at the next time point when it occurred in highly cohesive neighborhoods.

Finally, neighborhoods with more perceived disorder and uncertainty regarding collective efficacy at one time point had lower levels of collective efficacy at the next time point, illustrating the importance of uncertainty along with updating.

A growing body of literature has employed the concept of collective efficacy to explain various neighborhood processes (for reviews of this literature, see Hipp and Wo 2015; Sampson 2006).

More so, a not uncommon consequence for any construct to which social scientists turn with

such vigor is that this wholesale adoption of a concept runs the risk of creating conceptual confusion.

That is, there is a risk that all things good are collective efficacy, just as the concept of

social capital sometimes simply indicates all things good in a neighborhood or

community.