JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Sociological Review.In this paper we present a "routine activity approach" for analyzing crime rate trends and cycles. Rather than emphasizing the characteristics of offenders, with this approach we concentrate upon the circumstances in which they carry out predatory criminal acts. Most criminal acts require convergence in space and time of likely offenders, suitable targets and the absence of capable guardians against crime. Human ecological theory facilitates an investigation into the way in which social structure produces this convergence, hence allowing illegal activities to feed upon the legal activities of everyday life. In particular, we hypothesize that the dispersion of activities away from households and families increases the opportunity for crime and thus generates higher crime rates. A variety of data is presented in support of the hypothesis, which helps explain crime rate trends in the United States 1947-1974 as a byproduct of changes in such variables as labor force participation and single-adult households.

This study demonstrates that the empirical literature on the structural covariates of homicide rates contains inconsistent findings across different time periods and different geographical units. This apparent variance of findings may be due to statistical or methodological artifacts of particular studies, such as different time periods covered, units of analysis, samples, model specifications, and problems of statistical analysis and inference. A baseline regression model using 11 structural covariates is estimated for cities, metropolitan areas, and states in 1960, 1970, and 1980. The empirical estimates of this model exhibit instability because of high levels of collinearity among several regressors. Principal components analysis is applied to simplify the dimensionality of the structural covariate space. Reestimation of the regression model then indicates that the apparent inconsistencies across time and social space are greatly reduced. The theoretical significance of the findings for substantive theories of violent crime are discussed. The past two decades have seen an upsurge in the number of empirical studies that address the question of why some cities, metropolitan areas, ' The research reported here was supported, in part, by National Science Foundation grant SES-8800595. We are grateful to five anonymous A J S referees for stimulating and useful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Requests for reprints should be sent to

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