Surveying Victims Options for Conducting the National Crime Victimization Survey (2008) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
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The review will consider priority uses for additional funding that may be obtained through budget ini tiatives or reallocation of resources within the agency. A focus of the panel's work will be to consider alternative options for conducting the National Crime Victimization Survey, which is the largest BJS program.
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Rather, our approach is to revisit the basic goals and objectives of the survey, to see how the current NCVS program meets those goals, and to suggest a range of alternatives and possibilities to match design features to desired sets of goals. PRESERVING THE VICTIMIZATION MEASURE There are no nationally available data on crime and victimization -- collected at the incident level, with extensive detail on victims and the social context of the event -- except those collected by the NCVS.
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The current design of the NCVS has benefited from years of experience, methodological research, and evaluation; it is a good and useful model that has been adopted by international victimization surveys as well as subnational surveys within the United States. The principal fault of the current NCVS is not a design flaw or methodological deficiency, or even that the design inherently costs too much to sustain, but rather -- simply -- that it costs more than is tenable under current budgetary priorities.
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Recommendation 3.2: Congress and the administration should ensure that BJS has a budget that is adequate to field a survey that satisfies the goal in Recommendation 3.1. OVERALL GOAL AND DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS In considering historical goal statements of the NCVS, as well as new ones, we find three basic goals to be particularly prevalent and important, in addition to the previously expressed goal of maintaining annual nationallevel estimates of victimization that are independent of official reports to the police: • Flexibility, in terms of both content (capability to provide detail on the context and etiology of victimization and to assess emerging crime problems, such as identity theft, stalking, or violence against and in volving immigrants)
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It is also the case that cost savings might be achieved by refining the NCVS sample stratification schemes. The current multistage cluster design of the NCVS automatically includes households sampled from counties and other geographic regions with large population sizes, clustering the remaining geographic areas by social and demographic information to produce similar strata from which the remaining sample is drawn.
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The NCVS path to automation has been somewhat complicated: full conversion to nonpaper survey questionnaires was achieved only in 2006, and -- as part of the most recent round of cost reductions -- BJS and the Census Bureau abandoned the use of the centralized CATI centers for NCVS interviews because anticipated cost savings never occurred. However, as redesign possibilities are considered, it is important that BJS continue to seek automation possibilities and not be limited to the NCVS traditional interview formats.
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In considering design possibilities, it is important that BJS try to develop schemes that are relatively robust to declines in response rate, as such declines are virtually certain. Recommendation 4.9: The falling response rates of NCVS are likely to continue, with attendant increasing field costs to avoid their decline.
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From page 8... ...
In addition to small-domain modeling using NCVS data, it may also be useful to explore ways to strengthen victimization surveys conducted by states and localities. Currently, BJS operates a program under which it develops victimization survey software and provides it to interested local agencies; however, those agencies must supply all the resources (funds and manpower)
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Regardless of the overall design of the NCVS, the British Crime Survey offers an attractive model: a streamlined core set of questions combined with a planned, regular slot for topical content.
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Several of our recommendations listed earlier identify gaps in existing research that must be filled to accurately inform trade-offs in design choices. More generally, the NCVS developmental work in the 1970s and the research conducted as part of the 1980s redesign effort are extensive, but we think that there is a paucity of recent methodological research making use of the post-1992-redesign NCVS instrument and techniques.
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From page 11... ...
We urge BJS to develop lines of research to ensure that such crimes are accurately measured on the NCVS instrument; these might include the testing of self-response options, such as audio computer-assisted interviewing. Recommendation 3.3: BJS should continue to use the NCVS to assess crimes that are difficult to measure and poorly reported to police.
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From page 12... ...
Just as we do not offer a single design path for the NCVS, we do not find justification for offering a conclusion on "Census Bureau" or "not Census Bureau." Based on the advantages and disadvantages, we suggest that "privatizing" the NCVS is not the panacea for high survey costs that some may believe it is. We have been provided no way of estimating the various costs associated with switching NCVS data collection agents; however, it is altogether appropriate to consider means of getting detailed and specific answers to these questions.
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We further suggest that BJS consider a design competition -- providing some funds for bidders to specify in detail how they would conduct a victimization survey. This design competition would effectively compensate bidders for their time in developing proposal specifications, but it should be run with a statement that a formal request for proposals may result from the competition (and not that it will definitely occur)
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