I forgot to include the abstract in the last email!
Ecometrics in the Age of Big Data: Measuring and Assessing Neighborhood Characteristics
Using Administrative Records
The collection of large-scale administrative records in electronic form by many cities
provides a new opportunity for the measurement and longitudinal tracking of neighborhood
characteristics, but one that will require novel methodologies that convert such data into
research-relevant measures. The current paper illustrates these challenges by developing
measures of physical disorder from Boston’s “Constituent Relationship Management” (CRM)
system. A sixteen-month archive of the CRM database contains more than 300,000
address-based requests for city services, many of which reference physical incivilities
(e.g., graffiti removal). The work seeks to solve three challenges presented by the raw
database: 1) identifyingcontent pertinent to the measure of interest; 2) assessing the
validity of the data using objective audits; and 3) establishing reliability criteria for.
This generated a multi-dimensional measure of physical disorder that could be measured
repeatedly for virtually no cost every 2-6 months, representing an important new resource
in research on urban disorder. The process also generated some additional ecometrics
regarding civic engagement and care for the public space. Ways to extend this methodology
to new data sets, locales, and research questions are discussed.
-----------------
Tess Wise
PhD Candidate
Harvard Department of Government
http://tesswise.com