Wave IV City Crime Rate Data User Guide

This Crime Rate Data file facilitates research examining the impact of community violence on the health trajectories of Add Health participants. Although Add Health disseminates crime statistics provided by the Uniform Crime Report (UCR); the UCR data are measured at the county-level. To add precision, the Crime Rate Data file uses data assembled by the Crime Open Database (CODE) which reports geocoded crime statistics at the point level (i.e., latitude and longitude). Based on police department crime data from 13 U.S. cities with high rates of crime, these source data enable the construction of average crime rates for these limited number of cities inhabited by Add Health participants at Wave IV. Merging Add Health data to geocoded crime rates by census tract permits tract-level analyses of a participant’s exposure to community violence during years 2008-2010.