A total of 352 cities in the following United States metropolitan areas were selected for this study: Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, Orange County, Orlando, Phoenix, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, Silicon Valley (Santa Clara), and Tampa/St. Petersburg. Selection was based on the fact that these areas developed during a similar time period and followed comparable development trajectories. In particular, these 14 areas, known as the "boomburbs" for their dramatic, post-World War II population growth, all faced issues relating to the rapid growth of tract-style housing and the subsequent development of low density, urban sprawls. Thus, by comparing a group of cities at similar "development" stages over the same 1970-2004 time period, the study worked to control for other city characteristics in isolating the effect of economic and racial/ethnic distribution across households and neighborhoods on city crime rate trajectories.
The study combined place-level data obtained from the United States Census with crime data from the Uniform Crime Reports for five categories of Type I crimes: aggravated assaults, robberies, murders, burglaries, and motor vehicle thefts. Specifically, logged rates were computed per 1,000 residents for each crime type for each year between 1970 and 2004. Data from the United States Census were used to construct place-level measurements of economic resources and racial/ethnic composition for the years 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000. Also, city-level variables pertaining to homeownership, single parent households, unemployment, population size, and the average age of city housing structures were included.
ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:
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AVAILABLE. This study is freely available to the general public.