Deprivation and Crime: Let’s avoid going round in circles

The connection between crime, including violence, and deprivation is firmly established, and many studies seek to deploy measures of deprivation in analyses of crime. One approach to conceptualising and operationalising deprivation commonly used in England is the English indices of deprivation 2019, specifically the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). The IMD operationalises deprivation and provides a useful tool to understand the link between crime and deprivation. However, the IMD is not without problems, as crime is included as one of the indicators of deprivation. Including crime rates as part of the deprivation measure can artificially inflate the correlation with the (crime) outcome and thus overestimate crime levels.  In this blog post researchers demonstrate an alternative approach by re-calculating a composite deprivation score while excluding the crime indicator.

Read more