Brazilian Crime Index
Keywords:
Measurement, Crime, Factor Analysis, HomicideAbstract
How to measure crime in Brazil? Two strategies are commonly used: 1) choosing a proxy (number of homicides) and 2) analyzing a dataset. According to specialized literature, both tend to produce measures with low validity and reliability. This paper attempts to correct these errors and proposes the creation of a crime indicator. Specifically, we use factor analysis to reduce ten variables: rape, attempted rape, bodily harm, homicide, attempted homicide, robbery (vehicle, financial institutions, and others), robbery with murder, illegal possession of weapons, possession of narcotics, and drug trafficking. The data refer to incidents recorded between 2010 and 2012 in the 26 states plus the Federal District. The results suggest the construction of an indicator with three orthogonal components, capable of explaining 70% of the total variance.
References
Asher, H. B. (1993). Causal modeling (2nd ed.). Sage.
Beato, F. C., Peixoto, B. T., & Andrade, M. V. (2004). Crime, oportunidade e vitimização. Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais, 19(55).
Becker, G. S. (1968). Crime and punishment: An economic approach. Journal of Political Economy, 76(2).
Blalock, H. M. (1979). The presidential address: Measurement and conceptualization problems: The major obstacle to integrating theory and research. American Sociological Review, 44(6), 881-894.
Blalock, H. M., Jr. (1967). Causal inference, closed populations, and measures of association. American Political Science Review, 61, 130-136.
Blalock, H. M., Jr. (1971). Causal models in the social sciences. Aldine-Atherton.
Brown, T. A. (2006). Confirmatory factor analysis for applied research. The Guilford Press.
Conster, H. L. (1969). Theory, deduction, and rules of correspondence. American Journal of Sociology, 75, 245-263.
Coombs, C. (1964). A theory of data. Wiley.
Dancey, C., & Reidy, J. (2006). Estatística sem matemática para psicologia: Usando SPSS para Windows. Artmed.
Ehrlich, I. (1973). Participation in illegitimate activities: A theoretical and empirical investigation. Journal of Political Economy, 81(3).
Eide, E. (1990). Economics of criminal behavior. Journal of Economic Law.
Entorf, H., & Spengler, H. (1998). Socio-economic and demographic factors of crime in Germany: Evidence from panel data of the German states. ZEW Discussion Papers, 98-16.
Gordon, R. A. (1968). Issue in multiple regression. American Journal of Sociology, 68, 195-204.
Gorsuch, R. L. (1983). Factor analysis. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Gould, E. D., Weinberg, B. A., & Mustard, D. B. (2002). Crime rates and local labor market opportunities in the United States: 1979-1997. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 84(1), 45-61.
Guttman, L. (1955). The determinancy of factor score matrices with implications for five other basic problems of common factor theory. British Journal of Statistical Psychology, 8, 65.
Hair, J. F., Jr., Anderson, R. E., Tatham, R. L., & Black, W. C. (2005). Análise multivariada de dados (6th ed.). Bookman.
Hauser, R. M., & Goldberger, A. S. (1971). The treatment of unobservable variable in path analysis. In H. L. Costner (Ed.), Sociological methodology (pp. 81-117). Jossey-Bass.
Heerman, E. F. (1963). Univocal or orthogonal estimators of orthogonal factors. Psychometrika, 28(2), 161-170.
Heineke, J. M. (Ed.). (1978). Economic models of criminal behaviour (pp. 391-402). North-Holland.
Heise, D. R. (1969). Problems in path analysis and causal inference. In E. Borgatta (Ed.), Sociological methodology (pp. 38-73). Jossey-Bass.
Jacobson, A. L., & Lalu, N. M. (1974). An empirical and algebraic analysis of alternative techniques for measuring unobserved variables. In H. M. Blalock (Ed.), Measurement in the social science: Theories and strategies (pp. 215-242). AVC.
Kolm, S.-C. (1973). A note on optimal tax evasion. Journal of Public Economics, 2, 265-270.
Lazarsfeld, P. F., & Rosenberg, M. (Eds.). (1955). Introduction to the language of social research. Free Press.
Peter, P., & Taylor, J. B. (1977). The deterrent effect of capital punishment: Another view. The American Economic Review, 67(3), 445-451.
Roberts, F. S. (2009). Measurement theory: With application to decisionmaking, utility, and social science. Cambridge University Press.
Singh, B. (1973). Making honesty the best policy. Journal of Public Economics, 2, 257-263.
Stigler, J. G. (1970). The optimum enforcement of laws. Journal of Political Economy, 78.
Sullivan, J. L. (1974). Multiple indicators: Some criteria of selection. In H. M. Blalock (Ed.), Measurement in the social science: Theories and strategies (pp. 243-269). AVC.
Tabachnick, B., & Fidell, L. (2007). Using multivariate statistics (5th ed.). Allyn & Bacon.
Thompson, B. (2004). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis: Understanding concepts and applications. American Psychological Association.
Wolpin, K. I. (1978). Capital punishment and homicide in England: A summary of results. American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, 422-427.
Zeller, R. A., & Carmines, E. G. (1980). Measurement in the social sciences: The link between theory and data. Cambridge University Press.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Ranulfo PARANHOS, José Alexandre da Silva Júnior, Willber Nascimento, Rodrigo Lins, Luís Roberto Nascimento de Oliveira
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish in the Annals of Data Analysis retain
the copyright of their work and agree to license it under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
