The discipline of Sociology has a rich history of including spatial context in the analysis of social issues. Much of this history has revolved around the development and application of spatial theory aimed at understanding the geographic distribution of social problems, the organization of communities, and the relationship between society and the environment. More recently, the social sciences have seen a large number of technological innovations that now make it possible to place social behaviour in spatial context. Consequently, because of the historical disjuncture in the development of...

The discipline of Sociology has a rich history of including spatial context in the analysis of social issues. Much of this history has revolved around the development and application of spatial theory aimed at understanding the geographic distribution of social problems, the organization of communities, and the relationship between society and the environment. More recently, the social sciences have seen a large number of technological innovations that now make it possible to place social behaviour in spatial context. Consequently, because of the historical disjuncture in the development...

Recently, increased attention has been given to the social and environmental context in which criminal offending occurs. This new interest in the human ecology of crime is largely demographic, both in terms of subject matter and increasingly in terms of the analytic methods. Building on existing literature within the social ecology of crime, this study introduces a new approach to developing and examining sub-county geographies of reported crime through the use of existing Census place and county definitions coupled with spatial demographic methods. This process of spatially decomposing...