Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-lvtdw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-15T19:00:29.485Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Methodological Change in the NCVS and the Effect on Convergence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2009

By
Shannan M. Catalano
Edited by
James P. Lynch  and
Lynn A. Addington
James P. Lynch
Affiliation:
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York
Lynn A. Addington
Affiliation:
American University, Washington DC
Get access

Summary

Historically the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) have provided different estimates of crime at the national level. Of the two, the NCVS traditionally reported more crime than recorded by police. In 2001, however, the number of serious violent crimes recorded by the police exceeded the number of crimes that victims said they reported to the police in the NCVS. This recent correspondence is the culmination of more than a decade of gradual convergence and raises important issues regarding the measurement of serious violent crime, particularly over time.

One of these issues is whether changes in the methodology employed in the NCVS could be contributing to the convergence with UCR estimates. Research shows that methodological change in the NCVS creates within series variation over time (Biderman and Lynch, 1991), yet the effect of such change remains largely ignored since the NCVS redesign in the early 1990s. This chapter examines whether the recent convergence between reported crimes in the NCVS and recorded crimes in the UCR is influenced by long-term methodological change in the victimization survey.

The chapter opens with an outline of the methodological changes to the survey and their potential effect on correspondence; a discussion of data sources and the construction of the variables used in the subsequent analysis follows. The results indicate that, except for changes in response rates and to a lesser extent computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI), changes in the NCVS design had minimal effect on the observed correspondence of the two series.

Type
Chapter
Information
Understanding Crime Statistics
Revisiting the Divergence of the NCVS and the UCR
 , pp. 125 - 155
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Addington, L. A. (2005). “Disentangling the effects of mobility and bounding on reports of criminal victimization.” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 21:321–343.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Atrostic, B. K., Bates, N., Burt, G., & Silberstein, A. (2001). “Nonresponse in U.S. government household surveys: Consistent measures, recent trends, and new insights.” Journal of Official Statistics 17:209–226.Google Scholar
Biderman, A. D., & Cantor, D. (1984, August). A longitudinal analysis of bounding, respondent conditioning and mobility as a source of panel bias in the National Crime Survey. Proceedings of the American Statistical Association, Philadelphia, PA.Google Scholar
Biderman, A., Cantor, D., Lynch, J. P., & Martin, E. (1986). Final report of research and development for the redesign of the National Crime Survey. Washington, DC: Bureau of Social Science Research.Google Scholar
Biderman, A., & Lynch, J. (1991). Understanding crime incidence statistics: Why the UCR diverges from the NCS. New York: Springer-Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blumstein, A. (2000). “Disaggregating the violence trends.” In Blumstein, A. & Wallman, J. (Eds.), The crime drop in America (pp. 13–44). New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Blumstein, A., Cohen, J., & Rosenfeld, R. (1991). “Trend and deviation in crime rates: A comparison of UCR and NCS data for burglary and robbery.” Criminology 29:237–263.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cantor, D., & Lynch, J. P. (2005). “Exploring the effects of changes in design on the analytical uses of the NCVS data.” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 30:293–319.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Catalano, S. (2004). The convergence between police recorded and victim reported serious violent crime, 1973–2003. Unpublished dissertation, University of Missouri – St. Louis.Google Scholar
DeHeer, W. (1999). “International response trends: results of an international survey.” Journal of Official Statistics 15:129–142.Google Scholar
Dugan, L. (1999). “The effect of criminal victimization on a household's moving decision.” Criminology 37:903–930.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Granato, J., & Suzuki, M. (1996). “The use of the encompassing principle to resolve empirical controversies in voting behavior: An application to voter sophistication in congressional elections.” Electoral Studies 15:383–398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gray, G. (1974). National Crime Survey – cities sample – request for special tabulations for San Francisco [memorandum]. Washington, DC: United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census.
Groves, R. (1989). Survey errors and survey costs. New York: Wiley.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Groves, R., & Couper, M. (1998). Nonresponse in household interview surveys. New York: Wiley.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Groves, R., & Nicholls, W. L. (1986). “The status of computer assisted telephone interviewing: Part II – data quality issues.” Journal of Official Statistics 2:117–134.Google Scholar
Gugarati, D. (1995). Basic econometrics. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Hindelang, M., Gottfredson, M., & Garofalo, J. (1978). Victims of personal crime: An empirical foundation for a theory of personal victimization. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger.Google Scholar
House, C. (1985). “Questionnaire design with computer assisted telephone interviewing.” Journal of Official Statistics 1:209–219.Google Scholar
Hubble, D., & Wilder, B. E. (1995). “Preliminary results from the National Crime Survey CATI experiment.” Proceedings of the American Statistical Association, Survey Methods Section, New Orleans, LA, August.Google Scholar
Kindermann, C., Lynch, J., & Cantor, D. (1997). Effects of the redesign on victimization estimates. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.Google Scholar
Langan, P. A., & Farrington, D. (1998). Crime and justice in the United States and in England and Wales, 1981–(1996) (BJS Report NCJ 169284). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice.Google Scholar
Lauritsen, J. L., & Catalano, S. M. (2005). “The National Crime Victimization Surveys.” In Encyclopedia of social measurement (Vol. 2, pp. 803–808). New York: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Lauritsen, J., & Schaum, R. (2005). Crime and victimization in the three largest metropolitan areas, 1980–98. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.Google Scholar
McDowall, D., & Loftin, C. (1992). “Comparing the UCR and NCS over time.” Criminology 30:125–132.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brien, O' R., Shichor, D., & Decker, D. L. (1980). “An empirical comparison of the validity of UCR and NCS crime rates.” Sociological Quarterly 21:391–401.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oldendick, R. (1993). “The effect of answering machines on the representativeness of samples in telephone surveys.” Journal of Official Statistics 9:663–672.Google Scholar
Penick, B., & Owens, M. (Eds.). (1976). Surveying crime. A report of the Panel for the Evaluation of Crime Surveys. Washington, DC: Washington National Academy of Science.Google Scholar
Persley, C. (1995, August). The National Crime Victimization Survey redesign: Measuring the impact of new methods. Presented at the annual meeting of the American Statistical Association, Orlando, FL.Google Scholar
Pindyck, R., & Rubinfeld, D. (1998). Econometric models and economic forecasts. Boston: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Rand, M. (1974). Evaluation of interview procedure test conducted in San Francisco [memorandum]. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census.Google Scholar
Reiss, A. (1982). Victimization productivity in proxy interviews. New Haven, CT: Institute for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University.Google Scholar
Roman, A., & Sliwa, G. (1982). Study of the impact of the increased use of the telephone in the NCS: Reply to the comments of Robert Groves [memorandum]. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census.Google Scholar
Smith, T. W. (1995). “Trends in nonresponse rate.” International Journal of Public Opinion Research 7:157–171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steeh, C., Kirgis, N., Cannon, B., & DeWitt, J. (2001). “Are they really as bad as they seem? Nonresponse rates at the end of the twentieth century.” Journal of Official Statistics 17:227–247.
Turner, A. (1984). “Report on 12- and 13-year-old interviewing experiment.” In Lehnen, R. & Skogan, W. (Eds.), The National Crime Survey, volume II: Methodological studies (pp. 67–68). Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of Justice. (n.d.). Criminal victimization in the United States, statistical tables, 1995–2003. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Retrieved January 25, 2006 from http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/cvusst.htm.
U.S. Department of Justice. (2004). Four measures of serious violent crime (BJS Fact Sheet). Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Retrieved January 25, 2006 from http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/cv2.htm.
U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. (1997). National Crime Surveys, 1973–1991. Conducted by U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [producer and distributor].
U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2006). National Crime Victimization Survey, 1992–2004. Conducted by U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. ICPSR ed. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [producer and distributor].

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×