Nature and Patterns of Homicide in Eight American Cities, 1978 (ICPSR 8936)
Version Date: Nov 4, 2005 View help for published
Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s)
Margaret A. Zahn;
Marc Riedel
https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08936.v1
Version V1
Summary View help for Summary
This dataset contains detailed information on homicides in eight United States cities: Philadelphia, Newark, Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis, Dallas, Oakland, and "Ashton" (a representative large western city). Detailed characteristics for each homicide victim include time and date of homicide, age, gender, race, place of birth, marital status, living arrangement, occupation, socioeconomic status (SES), employment status, method of assault, location where homicide occurred, relationship of victim to offender, circumstances surrounding death, precipitation or resistance of victim, physical evidence collected, victim's drug history, victim's prior criminal record, and number of offenders identified. Data on up to two offenders and three witnesses are also available and include the criminal history, justice system disposition, and age, sex, and race of each offender. Information on the age, sex, and race of each witness also was collected, as were data on witness type (police informant, child, eyewitness, etc.). Finally, information from the medical examiner's records including results of narcotics and blood alcohol tests of the victim are provided.
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Geographic Coverage View help for Geographic Coverage
Time Period(s) View help for Time Period(s)
Date of Collection View help for Date of Collection
Sample View help for Sample
A purposive sample of eight cities was selected based on geographic region, population size, and whether their 11-year homicide trend lines followed or diverged from respective regional trend lines. Dallas, St. Louis, and "Ashton" diverged from regional patterns, while the other cities in the sample--Philadelphia, Newark, Chicago, Memphis, and Oakland--followed them. Within each city all homicide cases were coded, except in Chicago, where a 50-percent systematic random sample of homicide cases was drawn.
Universe View help for Universe
Cases in the United States defined by each city's police department and medical examiner as homicide.
Data Source View help for Data Source
official records of the medical examiner and police department in each city
Data Type(s) View help for Data Type(s)
HideOriginal Release Date View help for Original Release Date
1988-10-25
Version History View help for Version History
- Zahn, Margaret A., and Marc Riedel. NATURE AND PATTERNS OF HOMICIDE IN EIGHT AMERICAN CITIES, 1978. Compiled by Center for the Study of Crime, Delinquency, and Corrections, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. ICPSR ed. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [producer and distributor], 1994. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08936.v1
2005-11-04 On 2005-03-14 new files were added to one or more datasets. These files included additional setup files as well as one or more of the following: SAS program, SAS transport, SPSS portable, and Stata system files. The metadata record was revised 2005-11-04 to reflect these additions.
1988-10-25 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:
- Performed consistency checks.
- Performed recodes and/or calculated derived variables.
- Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.
Notes
The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.
This dataset is maintained and distributed by the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD), the criminal justice archive within ICPSR. NACJD is primarily sponsored by three agencies within the U.S. Department of Justice: the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.