Surveying Victims Options for Conducting the National Crime Victimization Survey (2008) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 15-24
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were adopted fairly rapidly, including the elimination of victimization surveys of commercial establishments and of selected large cities.1 The National Crime Survey was established as the name of the survey of sampled households. The report also contributed to a discussion of long-term redesign options starting in the early 1980s -- initiated by the Department of Justice and executed by a consortium of academic and government survey researchers -- that culminated in a reengineered (and renamed)
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The first portion of the post1992 NCVS is a screening questionnaire, using detailed questions to elicit counts and basic information about crime victimization incidents in the preceding 6 months. An incident report is then prepared for each incident detected in the screener, including a battery of questions on the context of each event.
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, with the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports. Concluding that lack of information on offenses not reported to police makes it difficult to develop useful crime policy, the commission recommends the development of a nationwide crime victimization survey.
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• July 1991: Renaming -- the survey name is changed to National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) , to refer to the data collected using the new questionnaire.
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In part, this is attributable to the fixed costs of converting the survey to electronic forms to facilitate computer-assisted interviews and to increased labor costs, but it is also due to the increasing difficulty of contacting survey respondents and gaining their cooperation. For BJS, the net consequence of these fiscal constraints has been the painful trade-off decisions required to support a full suite of justice-related data collections while a single program has consumed the bulk of the agency's limited resources.
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implement a 14 percent sample cut, as a balance for using the bounding first interviews, and (3) suspend all computer-assisted telephone interviewing from Census Bureau call centers (however, field interviewers may still use the telephone to conduct their scheduled interviews)
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For the American public, the consequence has been the degradation of a key social indicator: rising data collection costs have led BJS to reduce the sample size of the survey and induce other less visible cost-cutting measures. Over the past decade, two trends -- the diminishing NCVS sample size and generally low and decreasing estimated overall victimization rates -- have combined, with the result that only large percentage changes in violent crime victimization rates -- at least 8 percent -- would be a statistically significant year-to-year change.4 As noted in the U.S.
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The review will examine the ways in which BJS statistics are used by Congress, executive agencies, the courts, state and local agencies, and researchers in order to determine the impact of BJS programs and the means to enhance that impact. The review will assess the organization of BJS and its relationships with other data gathering entities in the Department of Justice, as well as with state and local violent crime victimization rates have dipped from 27.9 to 21.2 per 1,000, and the 95 percent intervals have been in excess of ±7 percent for each of those annual estimates.
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As we discuss further in Section 3–D, the methodological focus of this report means that we do not attempt as exhaustive a listing of constituencies and uses for the NCVS as our overall charge suggests; we intend to consider a more complete assessment of the user base in our final report. Furthermore, this report does not and is not intended to provide comprehensive treatment of all BJS programs, nor 5 In "Strengthening Federal Statistics," Appendix 4 of the president's proposed budget for fiscal year 2008, one of two initiatives specifically referenced in the BJS budget request is "a redesign of the National Crime Victimization Survey based on anticipated recommendations from the Committee on National Statistics of the National Research Council," i.e., this panel.
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Appendix C describes the sample design of the NCVS, as well as the interviewing procedures for the survey and the content of the survey instrument. In Appendix D, we describe other data resources that are available for studying aspects of criminal victimization; a major portion of that appendix describes the Uniform Crime Reporting program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation which -- as the national inventory of crimes reported to police -- is the data source to which the NCVS is most commonly compared for the purpose of assessing crime trends in the United States.
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