An Empirical Analysis of Factors Influencing

Interim Project Journal

1st WEEK (From October 29 to November 4)

After getting the approval of our project, we formally started to process. Professor gave us one comment about using a scaled dependent variable to make cities more comparable because the definition of a “city” may not be uniform. We all agreed that it was a reasonable idea and decided to use number of crimes/ populations size as our dependent variable. Next, we four started to search for the original data of dependent variable y and useful websites.

TASK: do background research, search for the possible data of dependent variable “number of crimes/ populations size” and the websites we may use in the future.

MAJOR FINDINGS: found the data table of number of crimes sorted by cities in 2010 (more than 300 samples), U.S. from FBI Website and several useful websites we will need, such as FBI Website, U.S. Bureau of Statistics, Federal & Local government Website, Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Census Bureau and Forbes.

PROBLEMS: one issue is matching the units of measurement. We found that it is very difficult to find data sorted by cities. We considered using M.S.A. instead.

2nd WEEK (From November 5 to 11)

TASK: one (Kanhua Pan) processes the data of dependent variable we found in the last week, the other three people (Yi Li, Wei Sun, Xiaowen Wu) separately collect the raw data of 3-4 independent variables sorted by M.S.A. Keep doing background research and previous related references.

MAJOR FINDINGS: using the websites mentioned above, we successfully collected data of 6 variables and 4 possible variables we didn’t mention in the proposal before (e.g. Percent of children under 18 years below poverty level in the past 12 months)

PROBLEMS: the data of some variables

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