Victimization data

Question 1

Cues to danger

Answer 1

• Darkness
• People (reassuring)
• Novelty
• Signs of incivility (trash, tags, broken windows)
• Dangerous people
  o Young males
  o Black males

Question 2

Criminal behavior hardest to measure (crime measurement) – why?

Answer 2

• Victims of crime are reluctant to tell the police that they have been a victim of crime
  o Fear of retaliation
  o Shame
  o Police not effective with some crimes
• Manipulation of data by authorities to not scare people

Question 3

Incidents of crime

Answer 3

Number of crimes or offences in a jurisdiction during a time-period

Question 4

Prevalence of crime

Answer 4

Number of criminals/offenders in a jurisdiction during a time-period

Question 5

UNIFORM CRIME REPORTS (UCR) tell us 3 things about a reported crime:

Answer 5

• est. 1929 - oldest crime reporting system in the United States.
• Offences known to the police (OKP)
• Arrests
• Clearance rate = number of arrests/OKP

Question 6

UCR flaws

Answer 6

Almost all of the data we get from the UCR is incorrect. Most crimes are not reported to the police. One traditional weakness of the UCR has been the failure to disaggregate crime statistics by ethnicity (e.g., arrest rates for Latinos).

Question 7

The dark figure of crime

Answer 7

The difference between UCR figures and the true incidence of crime

Question 8

Counting rule

Answer 8

in a criminal event that involves numerous crimes only the most serious crime is counted.

Question 9

There are two crimes that the FBI keeps count of correctly:

Answer 9

1. Homicides
2. Car theft
3. Arson

Question 10

Self-report method issues

Answer 10

Self-report researchers confidentially interview members of a population (usually a sample) and ask them to report their own criminal or delinquent behavior during some designated period of time (usually a year).

Question 11

Certainty of punishment

Answer 11

Very low. Crime is usually done by adolescents and in groups. Most data collected on juveniles.

Question 12

Victimization data

Answer 12

Researchers survey a population (again, usually a sample) and ask respondents to report incidents of crime committed against them or their household during a specified period of time (usually 6 months or 1 year).

Question 13

The National Crime Victimization Survey

Answer 13

(est. 1973) An ongoing sample survey of about 90 000 households and 160 000 individuals each year. This large sample size is necessary because some crimes are statistically rare events and require very large samples to obtain statistically reliable estimates. The NCVS measures fewer offenses than the UCR or most self- report surveys (rape and sexual assault, robbery, aggravated and simple assault, theft, household burglary, and motor vehicle theft), but its estimates of some crimes are considered to be the best available.

Question 14

Self-report method breakthrough discoveries

Answer 14

♣ Dark figure of crime
♣ Among juveniles (the age-group with the highest rate of offending), violating the law proved to be group behavior in most instances rather than the action of solitary offenders.
♣ The certainty of apprehension and punishment for many crimes was also discovered to be vanishingly low

Question 15

Self-report method issues

Answer 15

o Confidentiality 
o Ethical dilemmas
o Validity/ Accuracy
   ♣ Self-report research on adults is rare - mostly conducted on HS students
   ♣ Do respondents tell the truth?

Question 16

National, longitudinal self-report studies examples

Answer 16

♣ National Youth Survey
♣ the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health,
♣ the Monitoring the Future survey.

They contain what are widely considered to be the best available data on topics like drug use and adolescent sexuality.

Question 17

Victimology

Answer 17

Rather than asking what kinds of people burgle homes, for example, victimologists ask an equally important question: What types of homes get burgled? This unique perspective generated a new body of knowledge in criminology and helped to align the field with emerging research in social science on risk and risk perception.

Question 18

Indirect victimization

Answer 18

Impacts of crime that extend beyond those who are direct victims of crime. A prime example is fear of crime, which criminologists discovered to be far more common than victimization itself, and stunning in its effects on American lifestyles

Question 19

Victimization survey limitations

Answer 19

♣ Some crimes (e.g., so-called victimless crimes like gambling and prostitution) cannot be measured via victims.
♣ Victimization surveys can be enormously expensive (particularly, if they rely on face-to-face interviews and large geographic areas
♣ Victim reports, as with self-reports, are susceptible to memory or recall errors on the part of respondents as well as ‘telescoping’ problems where respondents accurately recall events but move them backward or forward in time.

Question 20

The International Crime Victims Survey

Answer 20

Collects data from 18 European countries with support from the United Nations and the European Commission. Among other contributions, its data on public perceptions and reactions to crime (including fear of crime) have advanced our understanding of the social impact of crime.

Question 21

The International Self-Report Delinquency Study

Answer 21

a self-report survey of seventh, eighth, and ninth graders in 31 countries (including China and Venezuela) that is administered by researchers in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University.