Question

Illinois State is worried about the rise in crimes in the state. The State Crime Control Unit engaged the services of a researcher to identify the factors that are contributing to rise in crime in the state. The researcher collected data for 50 cities within Illinois to ascertain the cause of rising crime. She collected data on seven variables including overall crime rate per 1 million residents in each of the 50 cities and reported violent crime rate per 100,000 residents.

The details of variables on which she collected data are as following.

Variable Name	Description
Crime Rate	Overall crime rate per 1 million residents
Violent Crime Rate	Reported violent crime rate per 100,000 residents
Funding	Annual police funding in $/resident
High School	% of people 25 years+ with 4 yrs. of high school
School Dropout	% of 16 to 19 year-olds not in high school and not high school graduates
Undergraduate	% of 18 to 24 year-olds in college
Graduate	% of people 25 years+ with at least 4 years of college

Your job, as assistant to this researcher is to help her identify which variables could form the best possible causes of rising crime in the state of Illinois. Answer the following questions:

1. Out of the 7 variables listed in the table above, which variables do you think are good candidates for consideration as dependent variable and which ones are good candidates for consideration as independent variables? Provide reasons for your choice of dependent variables and independent variables. Keep in mind that a variable can be recommended as an independent variable as well as a dependent variable. Identify which dependent variable can be predicted by which independent variable.

List possible dependent variables and reason for your choice here:

List possible independent variables and reason for your choice here:

Identify possible predictors for a dependent variable i.e. list the dependent variable and the corresponding independent/predictor variables. You can add more rows to the table if needed.

Answer 1

Dependent variables could be crime rate and violent crime rate as our aim is to predict the causes of rising crime in the state of Illinois and the overall crime rate per 1 million residents, reported violent crime rate per 100,000 residents can help in predicting the crime rate.

All the other variables can be independent variables as they can help in understanding the behavior of people on an overall level mainly in terms of education and financial background.

School dropout and funding can be important predictors of crime rate as those who have not passed school are likely to look for alternative sources of income pertaining to lack of jobs for uneducated people.