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A time-series approach to the relationship between homicide and other adverse health phenomena.
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Description: PUBLISHED OPEN ACCESS IN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC HEALTH (2023) doi: 10.1007/s10389-023-01929-x. Research in both criminology and public health has long identified that crime and violence tend to cluster together with adverse phenomena in the social and the health domain. However, such work has relied primarily on cross-sectional analysis. In this short communication we instead study trends over time, and ask whether homicide and other public health phenomena - such as smoking behaviour, alcohol use, child mortality, adolescent pregnancies and suicide - show similar trends over time. We take data from the Netherlands, between 2000 and 2020, and observe that all of the phenomena – with the exception of suicide – declined over the period under study. We then employ a time-series analysis to examine whether these trends arise independently, or whether they are the result of structural similarities between phenomena. Results showed that the decline in homicide rates is linked to a similar decline in adolescent pregnancies – the rates of these phenomena “move together” during the period under study. This work, then, furthers our understanding of the place of homicide in the domain of (public) health.