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Affiliated Faculty
Michael Maltz
Adjunct Faculty
Research Interests:
My primary professional interest has been focused on making valid and useful inferences from data. More specifically, I am concerned with ensuring that the inferences are not attributable to biases in the data used, nor to the way they were collected, nor to the methods used to analyze them. Earlier in my career this led to the development of mathematical models of various criminal processes (recidivism, cigarette smuggling, collusion among bidders). More recently, I have directed my attention toward the visualization of data as a means of inferring patterns from the data. This has led to projects in crime mapping and in other graphical representations of crime data. In particular, I have been working on methods to graphically portray trajectories of the life courses of individuals and organizations.
An offshoot of this interest has been a strong concern about the validity of the crime data used by researchers to make inferences. This has led to in-depth analyses of the way crime data are collected and aggregated, and how missing data are dealt with. Current projects include developing better methods of imputing to fill in for missing crime data.
Dataset: Monthly Uniform Crime Report (UCR) data from 1960 to 2004, for over 17,000 police departments, for 26 crime categories or subcategories, at http://sociology.osu.edu/mdm/UCR1960-2004.zip
Recent Publications:
- Recidivism, Academic Press, 1984/2001.
- Mapping Crime in Its Community Setting: Event Geography Analysis, Springer, 1990/2000.
- "Deviating from the mean: The declining significance of significance." Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Vol. 31 No. 4, November 1994 434-463. [Spanish translation: "Desviándose de la media: La declinación significativa de la significancia."]
- “Missing UCR data and divergence of the NCVS and UCR trends,” Chapter 10 (pp. 269-295) in J. Lynch and L. Addington, Eds., Understanding Crime Statistics: Revisiting the Divergence of the NCVS and the UCR, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
- “Some p-baked thoughts (p > 0.5) on experiments and statistical significance.” Journal of Experimental Criminology, 2006, Vol. 1, No. 2, 211-226.
- “Waves, particles, and crime” (Springer, 2009). Units of Analysis in the Study of the Geography of Crime, W. Bernasco, G. Bruinsma, and D. Weisburd, Eds.
