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    • Minimum Legal Drinking Age and Crime in the United States, 1980-1987

    Metadata Updated: November 28, 2023

    This collection focuses on how changes in the legal drinking age affect the number of fatal motor vehicle accidents and crime rates. The principal investigators identified three areas of study. First, they looked at blood alcohol content of drivers involved in fatal accidents in relation to changes in the drinking age. Second, they looked at how arrest rates correlated with changes in the drinking age. Finally, they looked at the relationship between blood alcohol content and arrest rates. In this context, the investigators used the percentage of drivers killed in fatal automobile accidents who had positive blood alcohol content as an indicator of drinking in the population. Arrests were used as a measure of crime, and arrest rates per capita were used to create comparability across states and over time. Arrests for certain crimes as a proportion of all arrests were used for other analyses to compensate for trends that affect the probability of arrests in general. This collection contains three parts. Variables in the Federal Bureau of Investigation Crime Data file (Part 1) include the state and year to which the data apply, the type of crime, and the sex and age category of those arrested for crimes. A single arrest is the unit of analysis for this file. Information in the Population Data file (Part 2) includes population counts for the number of individuals within each of seven age categories, as well as the number in the total population. There is also a figure for the number of individuals covered by the reporting police agencies from which data were gathered. The individual is the unit of analysis. The Fatal Accident Data file (Part 3) includes six variables: the FIPS code for the state, year of accident, and the sex, age group, and blood alcohol content of the individual killed. The final variable in each record is a count of the number of drivers killed in fatal motor vehicle accidents for that state and year who fit into the given sex, age, and blood alcohol content grouping. A driver killed in a fatal accident is the unit of analysis.

    Access & Use Information

    Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: us-pd

    Downloads & Resources

    Dates

    Metadata Created Date August 18, 2021
    Metadata Updated Date November 28, 2023

    Metadata Source

    Harvested from DOJ JSON

    Other Data Resources

    Additional Metadata

    Resource Type Dataset
    Metadata Created Date August 18, 2021
    Metadata Updated Date November 28, 2023
    Publisher National Institute of Justice
    Maintainer
    Identifier 3844
    Data First Published 1992-03-04T00:00:00
    Language eng
    Data Last Modified 2006-03-30T00:00:00
    Public Access Level public
    Bureau Code 011:21
    Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
    Metadata Catalog ID https://www.justice.gov/data.json
    Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
    Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
    Harvest Object Id 6c47e1c8-8fca-422d-897c-f9479fbb6d4c
    Harvest Source Id 3290e90a-116f-42fc-86ac-e65521ef3b68
    Harvest Source Title DOJ JSON
    License http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
    Program Code 011:060
    Publisher Hierarchy Office of Justice Programs > National Institute of Justice
    Source Datajson Identifier True
    Source Hash 24d1c5b4cb9c6632cd339305c67714b65f0c2b39159a6d9e58d3ae834c1eb801
    Source Schema Version 1.1

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