The defense date for my prospectus, What we can learn from small units of analysis, is finally set, November 1st at 9:30 (location TBD). You can find an electronic copy of the prospectus here and below is the abstract. So bring your slings and arrows (and I’ll bring some hydrogen peroxide and gauze?)

What we can learn from small units of analysis
Andrew Wheeler Prospectus Defense 11/1/2013

The dissertation is aimed at advancing knowledge of the correlates of crime at small geographic units of analysis. I begin the prospectus by detailing what motivates examining crime at small places, and focus on how aggregation creates confounds that limit causal inference. Local and spatial effects are confounded when using aggregate units, so to the extent the researcher wishes to distinguish between these two types of effects it should guide what unit of analysis is chosen. To illustrate these differences, I propose data analysis to examine local, spatial and contextual effects for bars, broken windows and crime using publicly available data from Washington D.C. I also propose a second set of data analysis focusing on estimating the effects of various measures of the built environment on crime.