Using police data to measure criminogenic exposure in residential and school contexts: experiences from a data linkage project in Germany

Abstract

Police data and survey research provide different bases to inform research on crime and delinquency. We argue that linking police data on local crime incidences to criminological surveys allows for new insights on the role of residential and school contexts for juvenile delinquency and violence. We describe the challenges and solutions of combining these data sources in a collaboration between the state police of North Rhine-Westphalia – Germany’s most populous state – and social scientists from a major German university. In this academic-practitioner partnership, data from a four-wave longitudinal study of more than 3800 students were linked to spatially aggregated data from the police crime statistics for the years 2013–2016. We discuss how the simulation of nearby addresses can serve as a tool for anonymized data linkage, how knowledge of the local data collection practices is crucial to evaluate the geocoding accuracy of address-level crime data, and how sensitivity and implication analyses can help to reduce uncertainties at the analysis stage. We also give recommendations for future research and data collection practices.