The Potential for Crime Overreporting in Criminal Victimization Surveys

Abstract

A critique is offered of’ the methodology of the criminal victimization survey and several sources of error that may result in artificially inflated crime rates based on such data are identified. It is argued that much information about crimes given by respondents may be incorrect due to misunderstandings about what transpired, ignorance about legal definitions, memory failures about when crimes occurred, and outright prefabrication. Organizational imperatives that may cause interviewers and coders to skew the data toward a showing of greater criminality are analyzed. Some ideas for measuring response error more precisely are presented.

Instability, informal control, and criminogenic situations: community effects of returning prisoners

“…Exploratory analyses suggest evidence for this in a weaker effect for a different measure of prior crime constructed from survey victimization reports-though such a measure is subject to its own measurement issues (e.g. [23,32]). In fact, a logged version of prior crime (which matches the functional form of the crime outcome induced by the log-link function) is so strongly related to future crime that other substantive predictors do not have significant effects.…”

Measuring Gender Differences in Partner Violence: Implications from Research on Other Forms of Violent and Socially Undesirable Behavior

“…Although this is usually assumed to mean that there is more crime than indicated by police records, these data alone do not rule out the alternative hypothesis that victim surveys identify more crime than actually occurs (Levine, 1976). Although few criminologists accept the latter hypothesis, it has long been acknowledged that victim surveys and police data are not sampling from the same universe of phenomena (Cohen & Land, 1984;Hindelang, Hirschi, & Weis, 1979;Huizinga & Elliott, 1986;Menard & Covey, 1988).…”

“…Many acts disclosed in self-report measures would not normally be classified as crime. Even items that appear to refer to serious infractions often lead to reports of trivial offenses that do not meet the legal definitions of the crimes they were intended to measure, amounting to 20-36% of all reports across several studies (Cohen & Land, 1984;Hindelang et al, 1979;Huizinga & Elliott, 1986;Levine, 1976). For example, a youth described as above the 90th percentile in delinquency in one sample reported no physical violence, but incidents such as helping himself to beers from a friend's refrigerator and lying about his age to get a reduced ticket price at the movie theater (Gold, 1970, cited in Hindelang et al, 1979.…”

“…Demand characteristics of surveys and even interviewer bias are another potential cause of overreporting (Levine, 1976). Demand characteristics include, for example, the effect of response categories on frequency reports.…”

“…For example, one can be pushed or shoved not only during physical play, but also in accidents, team sports, or to be taken out of harm's way. There are also settings, such as subway stations during rush hour (Levine, 1976), where pushing is commonplace. By and large, such incidents are not socially constructed as violence, which implies behavior that is deemed at the least as inappropriate, and more typically as intentionally causing unwanted suffering (Pontara, 1978).…”