Surveying Victims: Options for Conducting the National Crime Victimization Survey

As presently implemented, the NCVS is a major national household survey using a rotating panel sample of addresses: after an address is chosen for the survey, each person age 12 or older in the household at that address is interviewed seven times at 6-month intervals. The first interview with a household is always done by personal visit, but subsequent interviews may be done by telephone if a number is available. The first portion of the post-1992 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. (The operations of the NCVS are described in more detail in Appendix C.) In 2005, the NCVS was administered to approximately 38,600 households, yielding interviews with 67,000 people. Sponsored by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) of the U.S. Department of Justice, the field collection of the NCVS is performed by the U.S. Census Bureau.³ Annually, BJS publishes reports and summary tables from the NCVS in two continuing report series, Criminal Victimization and Crime and the Nation’s Households (see, e.g., Catalano, 2006; Klaus, 2007). BJS also uses NCVS data as the basis for periodic or one-shot reports on a wide array of topics and victimization types, including carjacking (Klaus, 1999, 2004), firearm use in crime (Rand, 1994; Zawitz, 1995), perceptions of neighborhood crime (DeFrances and Smith, 1998), victimization of college students (Baum and Klaus, 2005), and workplace violence (Warchol, 1998).

Over its 35-year history—major highlights of which are listed in Box 1-1—the NCVS has been a uniquely valuable source of information on crime. Intended to shed light on the “dark figure of crime”—the phrase coined by Biderman and Reiss (1967) to describe criminal incidents that are not reported to police—it is frequently used in conjunction with data from the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, through which the Fed-

level surveys of businesses as well as national and city-level household surveys. The national household survey component—originally referred to as the National Crime Panel program—was the only part to survive into the late 1970s and became known as the National Crime Survey (singular), commonly abbreviated as NCS. This remained the standard nomenclature until the 1992 switch to National Crime Victimization Survey or NCVS. In this report, we use NCS in direct quotations when applicable, but generally use NCVS as the descriptor.

Another terminological note is in order for references to BJS. The organizational unit responsible for developing and analyzing the survey was—as of 1970—known as the National Criminal Justice Statistics Center. By mid-decade, it was dubbed the National Criminal Justice Information and Statistics Service (NCJISS) and was a constituent component of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) of the U.S. Department of Justice. In 1984, reauthorization legislation dispersed the functions of the LEAA throughout a new Office of Justice Programs (OJP) in the Justice Department, overseen by an assistant attorney general. The statistical and data-gathering functions of the former NCJISS were vested in the new Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). As with references to the NCVS, we tend to use “BJS” to describe the agency, regardless of the exact date in question, except in direct quotations.

Table of Contents

Front Matter R1-R22

Executive Summary 1-14

1 Introduction 15-24

2 Goals of the National Crime Victimization Survey 25-40

3 Current Demands and Constraints on the National Crime Victimization Survey 41-80

4 Matching Design Features to Desired Goals 81-116

5 Decision-Making Process for a New Victimization Measurement System 117-126

References 127-142

Appendixes 143-144

Appendix A: Findings and Recommendations 145-148

Appendix B: Principal Findings and Recommendations of the National Research Council (1976b) Study 149-152

Appendix C: Procedures and Operations of the National Crime Victimization Survey 153-170

Appendix D: The Uniform Crime Reporting Program 171-176

Appendix E: Other Victimization Surveys: International and U.S. State and Local Experience 177-190

Appendix F: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff 191-196