Measurement Problems in Criminal Justice Research Workshop Summary (2003) / Chapter Skim
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This report provides information that was presented at the workshop. TWO MAJOR DATA SOURCES Most measurement of crime in this country emanates from two major data sources.
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Such problems include nonreporting and false reporting, nonstandard definitions of events, difficulties associated with asking sensitive questions, sampling problems such as coverage and nonresponse, and an array of other factors involved in conducting surveys of individuals and implementing official data reporting systems. Compounding these problems are the recent interest in rare crime events, such as violent crimes committed by youth and hate crimes; the need for attention to vulnerable subpopulations, such as very young and school-age children and disabled, elderly, and immigrant populations; and a focus on small- or local-area estimates of crime and victimization.
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to the current level of 42,000 households (Patsy Klaus, senior statistician, Bureau of lustice Statistics, personal communication, 7124102~. The promise of improvements in data on reported crimes through conversion to an incidentbased reporting system has not been realized because of a lack of funding to Participants noted that many of the papers commissioned to support the redesign of the NCVS are buried in archives or personally held files; as a result, a handful of government officials and scholars know more about how to solve some of these problems than many academics and policy officials realize, but the kind of careful experimentation with different methods, which is required to develop standards against which things can be measured, has not taken place.
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events, estimating crime and victimization in rural counties and townships, and developing unbiased prevalence and incidence rates for rare events among population subgroups. There also was a discussion of how to define and measure new types of crime: street crimes, such as carjacking, which combines car theft with robbery, assault, and sometimes homicide; and cyber crime, which combines ordinary forms of white-collar crime, such as fraud, with technology-based offenses, such as hacking.
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A brief summary of the topics aclclressecl in the other two commissioned papers appears below. It discusses particular issues that can arise when using surveys to draw inferences on specific subgroups, ancl methodological issues associated with measuring crimes in small geographic areas, from papers respectively by Richard McCleary, Douglas Wiebe, ancl David Turbow ancl by T.E.
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These biases, the authors argue, should be sufficient to rule out any attempt to estimate low-probability events with a sample survey screening design, such as the National Crime Victimization Survey, and to instead develop estimates using a sampling frame that targets the specific group of interest. The authors also recommend using state-of-the-art survey methodologies that apply what is known about cognitive processes to interviewing techniques (also discussed by Tourangeau and McNeeley in Chapter 21.
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However, many difficult barriers remain to drawing credible inferences using these data systems. The classic survey sampling problems of response and coverage are of special concern when attempting to measure stigmatized and other deleterious events.
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Much ofthe knowledge about reporting errors in crime surveys comes from crosssectional studies. Using self-reports in longitudinal studies, especially ones that cover major portions of the life course, creates a new set of challenges.
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2000 Combining Information from Multiple Sources for Small Area Estimation of Victimization Rates. Paper commissioned for the Committee on Law and Justice, Workshop on Measurement Problems in Criminal Justice Research, July 2000, National Research Council, Washington, DC.
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