| The ecological study of crime has been a topic of interest in criminology for quite some time and has been investigated for a wide range of city sizes, types, neighborhood settings, and points in time. Virtually all attempts to develop ecological models of crime have nevertheless overlooked spatial dependence, spread and heterogeneity in their conceptualizations. The present study is an attempt to address this omission through the application of Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies and spatial analysis procedures to the study of metropolitan and nonmetropolitan violent crime patterns in the United States at the county level for 1977–1996.;The principal objectives of this dissertation are threefold. The first goal is to apply the exploratory and analytical capabilities of GIS to a relatively unexplored area of criminological research-the diffusion of violent crime. A second objective is to investigate the extent to which violent crime is spreading from metropolitan to nonmetropolitan locations and the degree to which violent crime rates in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan locations are converging over time. A third objective is to develop a diffusion model of violent crime and to examine various types of diffusion processes—including expansion diffusion, relocation diffusion, and hierarchical diffusion—and the specific demographic and spatial mechanisms through which these diffusion processes operate with regard to the spread of violent crime. In particular, these hypothesized mechanisms include spatial proximity, regional location, size of place, population growth, population mobility, population composition (age- and sex-structure), and population diversity. |
