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Wim Bernasco and Henk Elffers contribute a chapter on the statistical analysis of spatial crime data in the new Handbook of Quantitative Criminology. Edited by Alex Piquero and David Weisburd, the handbook is designed to be an authoritative volume on methodological and statistical issues in criminology and criminal justice.

While the geography of crime has been a focal concern in criminology from the very start of the discipline, the development and use of statistical methods specifically designed for spatially referenced data has evolved more recently. The chapter by Bernasco en Elffers gives an overview of the application of such methods in research on crime and criminal justice, and provides references to the general literature on geospatial statistics, and to instructive and innovative applications in the crime and criminal justice literature.

The chapter addresses the specific challenges involved in the statistical analysis of spatial crime data, including issues of sampling and choosing a spatial unit of analysis. The authors discuss the specification of spatial structure and the concept of spatial autocorrelation, and review a variety of spatially informed regression models and their applications. They also explore methods used in the analysis of movement patterns in the field of crime and criminal justice, including spatial interaction models, spatial choice models, and the analysis of mobility triads.

 

Read more or order here (http://www.springer.com/social+sciences/criminology/book/978-0-387-77649-1). An electronic version is also available.


Full reference
Bernasco, W. and Elffers, H. (2010). Statistical Analysis of Spatial Crime Data. In: Piquero, A. and Weisburd, D. (Eds.) Handbook of Quantitative Criminology (pp. 699-724). New York: Springer.