What is the purpose of the National crime victim survey?

Surveys seek to establish how many individuals have been victimised and how many have reported their victimisation to the police. Victimization surveys attempts to bypass the underreporting problem by going directly to the victims. The major advantage of victimization surveys is that they go out into the population and ask for information, not waiting for incidents to be reported to an agency.

The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census in cooperation with the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the U.S. Department of Justice. The NCVS polls over 50,000 households, totalling over 100,000 individuals, in the United States annually using a multistage sample of housing units. Individuals over 12 years old in selected households are interviewed every six months for about three years. The first interview is conducted face-to-face and only used to bound the responses. Further interviews are conducted over the telephone.

Surveys revealed high percentages of unreported and unrecorded victimisations.

Victimisation surveys have played an important role in criminology and in policy-making. They especially provide better estimates of the extent of crime than that provided by official statistics and they also give insights into victims' experiences of crime and of the criminal justice system.

Disadvantages

· Reliability of information.

· Individuals maybe asked to reveal explicit information (rape).

· The interviews are conducted over the telephone and other household members may be present.

· The privacy is needed to maximize reporting and it is not ensured by the interview protocol.

· Victimization surveys are extremely expensive, a survey of the population cannot be seen as not financially feasible, because a large sample is needed to reliably project state-wide victim rates, and information is still based upon estimation.

· There is no guarantee that individuals will be any more willing to report events to census workers than to the police.

· In addition, the quality and quantity of information obtained by a survey is very sensitive to how questions are asked.