National Academies Press: OpenBook

Surveying Victims: Options for Conducting the National Crime Victimization Survey (2008)

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

« Previous: Appendix A: Findings and Recommendations
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Principal Findings and Recommendations of the National Research Council (1976b) Study." National Research Council. 2008. Surveying Victims: Options for Conducting the National Crime Victimization Survey. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12090.
×
Page 149
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Principal Findings and Recommendations of the National Research Council (1976b) Study." National Research Council. 2008. Surveying Victims: Options for Conducting the National Crime Victimization Survey. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12090.
×
Page 150
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Principal Findings and Recommendations of the National Research Council (1976b) Study." National Research Council. 2008. Surveying Victims: Options for Conducting the National Crime Victimization Survey. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12090.
×
Page 151
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Principal Findings and Recommendations of the National Research Council (1976b) Study." National Research Council. 2008. Surveying Victims: Options for Conducting the National Crime Victimization Survey. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12090.
×
Page 152

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

–B– Principal Findings and Recommendations of the National Research Council (1976b) Study B–1 FINDINGS 1. The design of the NCS generally is consistent with the objective of producing data on trends and patterns of victimization for certain cat- egories of crime. 2. Conceptual, procedural, and managerial problems limit the potential of the NCS, but the panel considers that, given sufficient support, the problems ought to be amenable to substantial resolution in the long run. 3. A major shift of resources to analytic and methodological research is essential in order for the NCS to yield data useful for policy formula- tion. This shift should be accompanied by the development of admin- istrative mechanisms to enhance this large and complex series’ capacity for self-correction. 4. The primary uses envisioned originally for the NCS were of a social and policy indicator nature. The panel agrees that a subsequent objec- tive of producing operating intelligence for jurisdictions is inconsistent with the original purposes of the NCS and with the design informed by 149

150 SURVEYING VICTIMS those purposes, except insofar as operating intelligence is a by-product of understanding broad trends and patterns of victimization. B–2 RECOMMENDATIONS 1. A substantially greater proportion of [Office of Justice Programs] re- sources should be allocated to delineation of product objectives, to managerial coordination, to data analysis and dissemination, and to a continuing program of methodological research and evaluation. We are concerned about the current balance between resources allocated to data collection and resources allocated to all other aspects of the victimization survey effort. 2. The staff providing managerial and analytic support for the NCS should be expanded to include the full-time efforts of at least 30 to 40 professional employees. Without this expansion, the NCS cannot be developed to achieve its potential for practical utility. 3. A coordinator at the Bureau of the Census should be appointed whose responsibilities would crosscut the various Census operations that sup- port the NCS. 4. The staff that performs NCS analysis and report-writing functions, whether LEAA employees or otherwise, should have an active role in the management of the NCS. Specifically, the analytic staff should par- ticipate in the development of objectives for substantive reports and publication schedules. Once analytic plans are formulated, the analy- sis staff should have autonomy in specifying tabulations to be used in support of the analysis, and it should have direct access to complete NCS data files and to data processing resources. It should be the ana- lytic staff ’s responsibility to formulate statistical or other criteria used in hypothesis testing. Finally, a feedback mechanism should be insti- tuted through which the staff can influence decisions on the content of survey instruments, on field and code procedures, and on analytic and methodological research to be undertaken. 5. Resources now used for the nationwide household survey and for the independent city-level household surveys should be consolidated and used for carrying out an integrated national program. The inte- grated effort could produce not only nationwide and regional data, but, on the same timetable, estimates for separately identifiable Stan- dard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs) and for at least the five largest central cities within them. For some purposes, it would be prac- ticable and perhaps useful to combine data for 2 or more years and to

APPENDIX B 151 show separate tabulations for a large number of cities and metropoli- tan areas. 6. A review and restatement of the objectives of the commercial surveys should be conducted and data collection should be suspended, except in support of experimental and exploratory review of these objectives. 7. Five percent of the NCS sample in the future should be available to in- terview in order to explore different forms and ordering of questions, and for pretesting possible new questions. . . . 8. Routine NCS tabulation should include results on the risk of victim- ization, where the unit of analysis is the surveyed individual, and that analysis of risk should be a significant part of NCS publications on a recurring basis. If the NCS data are coded and tabulated so as to yield a cumulative count of personal and household victim experiences of all surveyed respondents, analyses of multiple victimization, including events now excluded as “series” incidents, could and should be routine components of official publications. 9. A major methodological effort on optimum field and survey design for the NCS should be undertaken. Toward this goal, high priority should be given to research on the best combination of reference period, fre- quency of interview at an address, length of retention in the sample, and bounding rules. Part of the recommended research in this area should be a new reverse record check study in order to assess: (a) dif- ferential degrees of reporting for different types of victimizations and different classes of respondents, (b) problems of telescoping and decay, and (c) biases in the misreporting of facts. 10. Local interest in victimization patterns should be addressed through LEAA-Census joint development of a manual of procedures for con- ducting local area victimization surveys. The federal government should produce reports on the NCS that contain detailed analyses of patterns and trends of victimization so as to allow law enforcement personnel, the public, and policymakers to draw inferences that might be applicable to the issues with which they are concerned. Informing the public and their policymakers of the distribution and modifiability of risk should be the primary objective of the NCS. SOURCE: National Research Council (1976b:3–5).

Next: Appendix C: Procedures and Operations of the National Crime Victimization Survey »
Surveying Victims: Options for Conducting the National Crime Victimization Survey Get This Book
×
Buy Paperback | $65.00 Buy Ebook | $54.99
MyNAP members save 10% online.
Login or Register to save!
Download Free PDF

It is easy to underestimate how little was known about crimes and victims before the findings of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) became common wisdom. In the late 1960s, knowledge of crimes and their victims came largely from reports filed by local police agencies as part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) system, as well as from studies of the files held by individual police departments. Criminologists understood that there existed a "dark figure" of crime consisting of events not reported to the police. However, over the course of the last decade, the effectiveness of the NCVS has been undermined by the demands of conducting an increasingly expensive survey in an effectively flat-line budgetary environment.

Surveying Victims: Options for Conducting the National Crime Victimization Survey, reviews the programs of the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS.) Specifically, it explores alternative options for conducting the NCVS, which is the largest BJS program. This book describes various design possibilities and their implications relative to three basic goals; flexibility, in terms of both content and analysis; utility for gathering information on crimes that are not well reported to police; and small-domain estimation, including providing information on states or localities.

This book finds that, as currently configured and funded, the NCVS is not achieving and cannot achieve BJS's mandated goal to "collect and analyze data that will serve as a continuous indication of the incidence and attributes of crime." Accordingly, Surveying Victims recommends that BJS be afforded the budgetary resources necessary to generate accurate measure of victimization.

  1. ×

    Welcome to OpenBook!

    You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

    Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

    No Thanks Take a Tour »
  2. ×

    Show this book's table of contents, where you can jump to any chapter by name.

    « Back Next »
  3. ×

    ...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

    « Back Next »
  4. ×

    Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

    « Back Next »
  5. ×

    To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter.

    « Back Next »
  6. ×

    Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

    « Back Next »
  7. ×

    View our suggested citation for this chapter.

    « Back Next »
  8. ×

    Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

    « Back Next »
Stay Connected!