Cambridge University Perception of Crime Statistical Analysis

In this assignment, you will take on the role of a data scientist for the UK government who has been

asked to investigate perceptions of crime in England and Wales. The particular issue of interest for the

government is the public’s fear of crime; that is, the extent to which people in England and Wales are

worried about being a victim of crime (e.g. burglary, mugging or physical attacks). This is the subject

of much debate within the media, and the government wishes to know both the extent of the issue

and its relationships with other factors.

Your task is to create a report which offers insight into this issue for government employees involved

in crime reduction. In order to present a compelling outline of the problem, you will have to create a

report which includes rigorous statistical analysis, presented in a way which is both attractive and

accessible to non-experts. Descriptive statistics and statistical tests should be used to support the

points that you make, but should be described so that the anticipated audience – policymakers within

government – will be able to understand the key principles involved.

Since some of the consumers of the research may be particularly data-savvy, and wish to interrogate

the analysis themselves, the report should be prepared with transparency and reproducibility in mind.

In particular, the code used to produce the analysis should be included so that it can be checked and

re-run if necessary. The report should therefore be delivered in the form of a Jupyter Notebook which

records and displays the analytical workflow.

Using data from the 2013/14 Crime Survey for England & Wales (CSEW), you should describe the levels

of worry in the population in whatever way you feel is most appropriate and informative. You should

also examine the relationships between other factors and worry about crime, using statistical tests

and modelling methods. In particular, you should examine the relationship with at least one variable

of each measurement type (nominal, ordinal and interval/ratio). Your report should include at least 3

graphics and at most 5, where each image counts as a single graphic (regardless of whether it is a

multi-panel plot, for example). These should be selected on the basis of their value to the overall

narrative of the report.

Minimum requirements:

• Provide a brief introduction to the issue being analysed and motivate the analysis which

follows. This does not need to be extensive or detailed – it can be assumed that consumers of

the report will be broadly familiar with the context – but should set the scene for the report.

• Open the CSEW dataset and identify the variable(s) relevant to this issue.

• Present descriptive statistics for the level of worry about crime among survey respondents.

• Identify several contextual variables which might have relevance to the issue. These should

include at least one nominal, one ordinal and one interval/ratio variable. The choice of

variables should be informed by the context of the task – that is, there should be some

rationale for your choices, which should be given.

• Examine, using appropriate statistical methods, the relationships between these variables and

worry about crime.

• Document, using comments, the code used to perform your analysis, so that a reader can

understand what each section of code is doing.

• Produce at least 3 graphics illustrating aspects of your analysis.

• Describe and interpret your analysis, and reflect on its real-world consequences and

implications.

Optional suggestions:

• Perform some aspects of the analysis on a disaggregated basis; i.e. identify subgroups which

may have relevance to the issue in question, and examine these groups separately.

• Identify and examine other potential relationships in the data; that is, rela