Accounting for Meso- or Micro-Level Effects When Estimating Models Using City-Level Crime Data: Introducing a Novel Imputation Technique

Abstract

Objectives: Criminological scholars have long been interested in how macro-level characteristics of cities, counties, or metropolitan areas are related to levels of crime. The standard analytic approach in this literature aggregates constructs of interest, including crime rates, to the macro geographic units and estimates regression models, but this strategy ignores possible sub-citylevel processes that occur simultaneously. Methods: One solution uses multilevel data of crime in meso-level units within a large number of cities; however, such data is very difficult and time intensive to collect. We propose an alternative approach which utilizes insights from existing literature on meso-level processes along with meso-level socio-demographic measures in cities to impute crime data from the city to the smaller geographic units. This strategy allows researchers to estimate full multilevel models that estimate the effects of macro-level processes while controlling for sub-city level factors.Results: We demonstrate that the strategy works as expected on a sample of 91 cities with mesolevel data, and also works well when estimating the multilevel model on a sample of cities different from the imputation model, or even in a different time period.Conclusions: The results demonstrate that existing studies aggregated to macro units can yield considerably different (and therefore potentially problematic) results when failing to account for meso-level processes.

The spatial and economic relationship between labour informality and homicides in Cali, Colombia

“…The spatial analysis of homicides is a topic of great academic interest (Baller et al, 2001; Cohen & Tita, 1999; Hipp & Williams, 2021; Messner, 1982; Messner et al, 1999; Sadler et al, 2022). It is important to highlight that the homicide rate has become the most reliable indicator in terms of monitoring citizen insecurity and violence, due to significant under‐reporting of other expressions of violence.…”