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22 • Justice Research and Policy school or within a distance of 1,000 feet of a public, parochial, or private school.” In the third analysis, Spatial Analyst, a tool that measures the physical dis- tance between objects and how densely they are concentrated, was used to examine the relationship between each of the target types and where the offenders lived. *Study Limitations As with any research, this study has certain limitations. The primary limitation is the assumption that child sex offenders are choosing to live within close proxim- ity to potential targets. The premise going into this research was that if there was a predominance of child sex offenders living close to potential victims, at least part of the reason was to take advantage of these potential targets. This initial premise was supported by our findings, but as with any research, rejection of the null hypothesis (that there is no relationship between where child sex offenders live and the geographic location of potential targets) does not imply absolute acceptance of the research hypothesis (that sex offenders choose to reside in close proximity to potential targets). Alternative hypotheses are also possible. For ex- ample, as discussed below, sex offenders could be residing in these areas because of a social or political inability to exclude undesirable residents from living there; or sex offenders may choose to live in these areas because they are more afford- able. It may be more accurate to say, then, that there is a relationship between where child sex offenders live and the geographical location of potential targets irrespective of choice. Since most people do make choices about where they live, however, it is also plausible (and is supported by the co-location of child sex offenders and targets in this research) that sex offenders are choosing to live in close proximity to potential victims. A second and related limitation of the study is that it does not make com- parisons with residents in these areas who had not been convicted of a sex of- fense. As one reviewer suggested, information should have been collected on the relative similarity of age, race, and income between sex offenders and other resi- dents. While this kind of information would have been helpful, we do not believe that it substantially changes the conclusions herein. First of all, this kind of infor- mation was not available for the sex offenders in this research (and neither was information we desired, such as whether the offender had children or not). Addi- tionally, this information is not particularly accurate for the general population. The 2000 Census was not out at the time of this research, and we believed that 1990 Census data were probably inaccurate given the changes in the characteris- tics of neighborhoods. Finally, we argue that it makes little difference to policymakers whether sex offenders are overrepresented on mean income in an