A General Framework for Building Dynamic Macro Social Indicator Models: Including an Analysis of Changes in Crime Rates and Police Expenditures

It is generally agreed that social indicators are measures of social conditions. Accordinlgy, recent interest in measuring social conditions and in building models of how various social forces determine changes in social conditions was predated by work of William F. Ogburn and his collaborators over 50 years ago. In this paper, we argue for a revival of analyses of social change based upon time series of indices of social conditions. To provide a general paradigm for this type of analysis, we describe (1) an opportunity-structures theoretical framework for generating specifications of equations of dynamic macro social indicator models, (2) a demographic accounting framework for grounding such equations in population stocks and flows, and (3) a structural equation strategy for estimating and evaluating the resulting models. To illustrate this paradigm, we present analyses of three equation determining changes in the national reported property crime rate, the reported violent crime rate, and the rate of public police expenditures. The equations fit annual 1947-72 time-series data well, yield theoretically meaningful coefficients, and lack demonstrable autocorrelation of disturbances. Moreover, the conditional forecasts of the 1973 values of the reported crime rates fall well within bounds set by the standard errors of the equations.

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