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Appendix B: Summary of Surveying Victims: Options for Conducting the National Crime Victimization Survey
Pages 333-346

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From page 333...
... of the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs (OJP)
From page 334...
... 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.
From page 335...
... Recommendation Int-3.1: BJS must ensure that the nation has quality annual estimates of levels and changes in criminal victim ization. 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.
From page 336...
... 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) and analysis (providing informative metrics be yond basic crime rates)
From page 337...
... . This would reduce the per-unit interviewing cost and free up resources to add additional sample addresses within each single year; 12 months is also the common reference period in victimization surveys in other countries.
From page 338...
... 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.
From page 339...
... Recommendation Int-4.9: The falling response rates of NCVS are likely to continue, with attendant increasing field costs to avoid their decline. BJS should sponsor nonresponse bias stud ies, following current OMB guidelines, to guide trade-off deci sions among costs, response rates, and nonresponse error.
From page 340...
... 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)
From page 341...
... We suggest that OJP consider ways of dedicating funds -- like BJA grants, but separate from BJS appropriations -- for helping states and localities bolster their crime information infrastructures through the establishment and regular conduct of state or regional victimization surveys. Such surveys would most likely involve cooperative arrangements with research organizations or local universities and make use of the existing BJS statistical analysis center infrastructure.
From page 342...
... 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.
From page 343...
... Part of this work involves reevaluation of basic products and reports from the NCVS and expansion of the range of analyses based on the data, and it involves both in-house research by BJS and effective ties with other users and researchers. Recommendation Int-5.2: BJS should perform additional and advanced analysis of NCVS data.
From page 344...
... Census Bureau's involvement with the NCVS predates the formal establishment of the survey, as the Census Bureau convened planning discussions and conducted NCVS pilot work. The optimal decision on who should do the data collection for the NCVS will depend on the weight that one puts on desired objectives for the survey.
From page 345...
... 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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