Social disorganization, marriage, and reported crime: A spatial econometrics examination of family formation and criminal offending

It has long been documented that “marriage matters” for a variety of reasons. Furthermore, there has been considerable debate over the causal relationship between marriage and a number of its associated correlates, most often related to social processes of health behaviors, criminal involvement, and achievement. While most research associated with marriage and crime is concerned with the individual, little is understood concerning the ecological effect of marriage rates. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the F.B.I.'s Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR), this study tests such relationships through the implementation of spatially-centered analytic approaches concerning the potential independent effects of marriage rates within a social disorganization context. It is important to understand such aggregate level effects in the face of the existing literature, which relies heavily on relational associations and is subject to ecological fallacy. Analytic techniques incorporate Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) and spatial regression.

Research Highlights►The spatial distribution of reported criminal offending is found to be non-randomly distributed across counties in the US. Given the scattterplot below one can see that the spatial distribution of crime for counties (X-Axis) is very likely to be like adjacent counties (Y-Axis). ►In the ecolgical framework of Social Disorganization, we find that ecological rates of crime are inversely related to criminal offending much the same way as indiviudal level rates.