Gender and Violent Victimization, 1973-2005 [United States] (ICPSR 27082)

Version Date: Sep 20, 2012

Cite this study |

Principal Investigator(s):
Janet Lauritsen, University of Missouri-St. Louis. Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice; Karen Heimer, University of Iowa. Department of Sociology

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR27082.v1

Version V1

Slide tabs to view more

Summary

The purpose of this project was to estimate long-term trends in violent victimization by gender and various socio-demographic factors. These factors included race and ethnicity, age, type of place (urban, suburban, rural), socio-economic status, marital status (for adults), and family status (for juveniles). The principal investigators also further disaggregated these violent victimization trends by victim-offender relationship to reveal trends in violence committed by strangers, intimate partners, and known/non-intimate offenders. The researchers produced these various trends in violent victimization by pooling and appropriately weighting the National Crime Survey and its successor, the National Crime Victimization Survey for the period 1973 to 2005, resulting in 33 years of data. In total, a series of 135 trends in violent victimization were developed.

Citation

Lauritsen, Janet, and Heimer, Karen. Gender and Violent Victimization, 1973-2005 [United States]. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2012-09-20. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR27082.v1

Export Citation:

  • RIS (generic format for RefWorks, EndNote, etc.)
  • EndNote

Funding

United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. National Institute of Justice (2007-IJ-CX-0026)

Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Smallest Geographic Unit

None

Distributor(s)

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
Hide

Time Period(s)

1973 -- 2005

Date of Collection

1973 -- 2006

Data Collection Notes

  1. The rates in this dataset represent three year moving averages of total violent victimization which includes attempted and completed rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, and simple assaults. The decision to use three year moving averages was made by the principal investigators so that estimates for smaller subgroups would be reliable and the trends would be comparable. Two year averages are used for the endpoints of the time series.

  2. Users should be aware that some of the original data sources have been deaccessioned and are no longer available from ICPSR. ICPSR 4451 has been replaced by ICPSR 22746; ICPSR 4276 has been replaced by ICPSR 22900; ICPSR 3995 has been replaced by ICPSR 22901.

  3. Users should refer to the project's final technical report (Lauritsen and Heimer, 2009; NCJ 229133) for additional information on the study methodology, weighting, and rate estimation procedures.

  4. Detailed information about the National Crime Survey (NCS) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is available through the National Crime Victimization Survey Resources Guide .
Hide

Study Purpose

The purpose of this project was to estimate long-term trends in violent victimization by gender and various socio-demographic factors. These factors included race and ethnicity, age, type of place (urban, suburban, rural), socio-economic status, marital status (for adults), and family status (for juveniles). The researchers also further disaggregated these violent victimization trends by victim-offender relationship to reveal trends in violence committed by strangers, intimate partners, and known/non-intimate offenders.

Study Design

To estimate the long-term trends in violent crime by gender and other socio-demographic correlates, the researchers used data from the National Crime Survey (NCS) and its successor, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). These rates were estimated using the public-use data files that are available through the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). The victimization rates for each year from 1973 to 2005 were estimated by using information available in the incident and person-level files, resulting in 33 years of data. For many of the NCVS rates, the researchers were able to rely on the concatenated incident-level file to produce the sample weighted incident counts. However, estimation of some of the rates required the use of annual incident-level and person-level files. More specifically, the researchers used annual incident files for the estimates for the 1970s, and used annual person-level files to create the denominators for all years. Violent victimization rates were defined to include attempted and completed crimes of rape, robbery, aggravated assault and simple assault.

Sample

The National Crime Survey/National Crime Victimization Survey uses a stratified, multi-stage cluster sampling design developed by the Census Bureau to be representative of persons ages 12 and older living in housing units in the United States.

Time Method

Time Series

Universe

All individuals in the United States ages 12 and older between the years 1973 to 2005.

Unit(s) of Observation

Year

Data Source

NATIONAL CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEY, 1992-2005: CONCATENATED INCIDENT-LEVEL FILES [ICPSR 4699]

NATIONAL CRIME SURVEYS: NATIONAL SAMPLE, 1986-1992 [NEAR-TERM DATA] [ICPSR 8864]

NATIONAL CRIME SURVEYS: NATIONAL SAMPLE, 1973-1983 [ICPSR 7635]

NATIONAL CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEY, 1992-2003 [ICPSR 3995]

NATIONAL CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEY, 2005 [ICPSR 4451]

NATIONAL CRIME SURVEYS: NATIONAL SAMPLE, 1979-1987 [REVISED QUESTIONAIRE] [ICPSR 8608]

NATIONAL CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEY, 2004 [ICPSR 4276]

Data Type(s)

Mode of Data Collection

Description of Variables

The study contains 176 total variables including the year, 135 violent victimization rate variables, and 40 population variables. The 135 violent victimization rate variables include victimization rates of females and males across various socio-demographic subgroups and by victim-offender relationship. Specifically, variable groups include gender, race/ethnicity by gender, age by gender, type of place by gender, household poverty status by gender, marital status by gender (adults), and household type by gender (youths).

Response Rates

Not applicable.

Presence of Common Scales

None.

Hide

Original Release Date

2012-09-20

Version History

2018-02-15 The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented. The previous citation was:
  • Lauritsen, Janet, and Karen Heimer. Gender and Violent Victimization, 1973-2005 [United States]. ICPSR27082-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2012-09-20. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR27082.v1

2012-09-20 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:

  • Standardized missing values.
  • Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.
Hide

Weight

Annual estimates from the weighted National Crime Survey (NCS) data and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data were combined to produce trends in violent victimization by gender and various socio-demographic factors for the period 1973 to 2005. Rates based on NCS data were weighted according to crime type to make the NCS trends comparable to the NCVS trends.

Hide

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.