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.