Propensity Score Methods in Criminology
Propensity score methods estimate the causal effect of a criminal-justice treatment — such as incarceration, gang membership, a diversion program, or arrest — from observational data, where random assignment is impossible. Building on Rosenbaum and Rubin's 1983 framework and adapted to crime research by Apel, Sweeten, and others, the approach summarizes many confounders into a single probability of treatment, then matches, weights, or stratifies on it to approximate a randomized comparison. This page covers the criminological application; for the general estimators see propensity-score-matching and propensity-score-weighting.
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Sources
- Rosenbaum, P. R., & Rubin, D. B. (1983). The central role of the propensity score in observational studies for causal effects. Biometrika, 70(1), 41–55. DOI: 10.1093/biomet/70.1.41 ↗
- Apel, R. J., & Sweeten, G. (2010). Propensity score matching in criminology and criminal justice. In Handbook of Quantitative Criminology (pp. 543–562). Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-77650-7_26 ↗
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Propensity Score Methods for Causal Inference in Criminology. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/criminology/propensity-score-criminology
Which method?
Set this method beside its closest kin and read them side by side — the library lays the books on the table; the choice is yours.
- Criminal Career ParadigmCriminology↔ compare
- Propensity Score MatchingResearch Statistics↔ compare
- Propensity Score WeightingCausal inference↔ compare
- Recidivism Survival AnalysisCriminology↔ compare