From the Maryland Population Research Center
"Large-scale mobility data derived from GPS-enabled devices are increasingly used to study how human movement shapes social processes, from responses to pandemics and natural disasters to the diffusion of crime across cities. Yet despite the growing availability of these data, there is little consensus about how mobility should be measured to best capture how routine movement connects urban areas. Integrating insights from social network analysis, geography, and criminology, this study examines how everyday patterns of movement connect neighborhoods, testing alternative approaches to measuring mobility networks and their ability to explain the diffusion of crime beyond geographic proximity alone. Using mobility and crime incident data from several U.S. cities, I construct networks linking census block groups through movement patterns and compare alternative approaches to measuring the strength and structure of these connections. I then assess whether crime in mobility-connected places at one time point predicts crime in focal neighborhoods at the next, providing a longitudinal examination of crime diffusion across urban areas. The findings demonstrate that how mobility ties are defined has important consequences for identifying relationships between places and understanding crime diffusion. More broadly, the study shows how mobility networks reveal forms of urban interdependence, offering a framework for understanding how everyday movement connects communities and shapes the spread of urban problems." Brian Soller is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research examines how social networks shape community processes, health and well-being, and career advancement among university faculty.
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