Quantitative criminology has certainly come a long way since I was ?rst introduced to a largely qualitative criminology some 40 years ago, when I was recruited to lead a task force on science and technology for the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. At that time, criminology was a very limited activity, depending almost exclusively on the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) initiated by the FBI in 1929 for measurement of crime based on victim reports to the police and on police arrests. A ty- cal mode of analysis was simple bivariate correlation. Marvin Wolfgang and colleagues were makingan importantadvancebytrackinglongitudinaldata onarrestsin Philadelphia,an in- vation that was widely appreciated. And the ?eld was very small: I remember attending my ?rst meeting of the American Society of Criminology in about 1968 in an anteroom at New York University; there were about 25–30 people in attendance, mostly sociologists with a few lawyers thrown in. That Society today has over 3,000 members, mostly now drawn from criminology which has established its own clear identity, but augmented by a wide variety of disciplines that include statisticians, economists, demographers, and even a few engineers. This Handbook provides a remarkable testimony to the growth of that ?eld. Following the maxim that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t understand it,” we have seen the early dissatisfaction with the UCR replaced by a wide variety of new approaches to measuring crime victimization and offending.

Table of Contents:
Descriptive Approaches for Research and Policy: Innovative Descriptive Methods for Crime and Justice Problems.- Crime Mapping: Spatial and Temporal Challenges.- Look Before You Analyze: Visualizing Data in Criminal Justice.- Group-Based Trajectory Modeling: An Overview.- General Growth Mixture Analysis with Antecedents and Consequences of Change.- Spatial Regression Models in Criminology: Modeling Social Processes in the Spatial Weights Matrix.- Mixed Method Research in Criminology: Why Not Go Both Ways?.- Descriptive Approaches for Research and Policy: New Estimation Techniques for Assessing Crime and Justice Policy.- Estimating Costs of Crime.- Estimating Treatment Effects: Matching Quantification to the Question.- Meta-analysis.- Social Network Analysis.- Systematic Social Observation in Criminology.- New Directions in Assessing Design, Measurement and Data Quality.- Identifying and Addressing Response Errors in Self-Report Surveys.- Missing Data Problems in Criminological Research.- The Life Event Calendar Method in Criminological Research.- Statistical Power.- Descriptive Validity and Transparent Reporting in Randomised Controlled Trials.- Measurement Error in Criminal Justice Data.- Statistical Models of Life Events and Criminal Behavior.- Estimation of Impacts and Outcomes of Crime and Justice: Topics in Experimental Methods.- An Introduction to Experimental Criminology.- Randomized Block Designs.- Construct Validity: The Importance of Understanding the Nature of the Intervention Under Study.- Place Randomized Trials.- Longitudinal-Experimental Studies.- Multisite Trials in Criminal Justice Settings: Trials and Tribulations of Field Experiments.- Estimation of Impacts and Outcomes of Crime and Justice: Innovation in Quasi-Experimental Design.- Propensity Score Matching in Criminology and Criminal Justice.- Recent Perspectives on the Regression Discontinuity Design.- Testing Theories of Criminal Decision Making: Some Empirical Questions about Hypothetical Scenarios.- Instrumental Variables in Criminology and Criminal Justice.- Estimation of Impacts and Outcomes of Crime and Justice: Non-Experimental Approaches to Explaining Crime and Justice Outcomes.- Multilevel Analysis in the Study of Crime and Justice.- Logistic Regression Models for Categorical Outcome Variables.- Count Models in Criminology.- Statistical Analysis of Spatial Crime Data.- An Introduction to Statistical Learning from a Regression Perspective.- Estimating Effects over Time for Single and Multiple Units.