Victim Participation in Intimate Partner Violence Prosecution - Implications for Safety: Kalamazoo County, Michigan, 1999-2002 (ICPSR 30741)

1. The study employed three distinct phases: (1) qualitative data collection, (2) abstraction, merging and analysis of administrative records, and (3) respondent verification meetings. Only administrative records data from phase 2 are available as part of this data collection.

Police/Prosecutor Long Notes Abstraction Form: This form was used to capture data elements from the police and prosecutor narrative reports, which provided information on victim and defendant demographics, relationship, history of violence, incident characteristics and criminal justice interactions with the victim. For each index incident, police reports and prosecutor case notes were reviewed. Incidents were not abstracted until the full set of reports had been compiled. Prior to abstraction, all reports for an incident were organized chronologically and were read in their entirety before marking on the abstraction form. Then each report was reread line by line, abstracting pertinent information as it occurred onto the abstraction form. In general, if there were conflicting details, the source most directly involved with a particular detail was considered the most accurate (for instance, if a police report noted that the defendant had fled the scene and the prosecutor notes indicated he was present, the police report was considered the primary source for this detail). When necessary, clarifications were obtained through consultation with the study project coordinator and study investigator team.

Criminal Court Records Abstraction Form: The criminal court abstraction form collected information about criminal justice actions, specifically case disposition and the criminal sanctions imposed. Only cases that had been accepted for prosecution had criminal court records. For these cases, the research team accessed court administrative records to obtain copies of the criminal court dockets. For some higher-order cases, adjudication occurs in Circuit court, and there are two dockets, one District court docket and one Circuit court docket. For these cases, both venues' dockets were reviewed, and the data were combined onto a single abstraction sheet for that case incident.

Emergency Department Abstraction Form: The Emergency Department (ED) Abstraction Form was used to identify all emergency department visits occurring during the study period. Hospital ED data was collected on the study sample of 993 female victims from all eight emergency departments (EDs) in the County area. The research team abstracted information on all ED visits during the 1999 to 2002 study period to identify visits that were related to IPV or injury. To determine if a visit was IPV or injury related, the research team reviewed several types of records for each visit: intake and discharge forms, physician dictations, paramedic and nursing notes, injury body map forms, photographs, social work notes, and violent injury report forms. A visit was coded as IPV or injury-related if the Reason-for-Visit code(s) or the Discharge-Diagnosis code(s) indicated assault or injury or if anywhere in the records there was a notation that the patient was experiencing abuse by her intimate partner, even if that visit was not specifically for an injury.

Prosecuting Attorney Dataset: This secondary dataset was provided by the prosecutor's office, from which the research team obtained variables related to a subset of the police incidents that led to intimate partner assault charging requests. This subset of cases comprised the IPV-prosecutor incident database. Originally, these IPV-prosecuted incidents were part of four intact datasets provided by the Prosecutor's office, one for each study year, 1999 through 2002. Each year's dataset contained all the charging requests with domestic assault charge codes for that year. All prosecutor incident charging requests that were linked to the study couple (where the study victim was the victim in the charging request and the study defendant was the defendant in the charging request) were identified and exported into a single IPV-prosecution dataset. Within this dataset, the charging requests that formed the study index events were marked so that they could be included or excluded from analysis as needed. The remaining, non-index prosecution incidents comprised the longitudinal IPV-prosecution variables.

Police Incident datasets: Police data were obtained for the study sample from the 12 police jurisdictions in the County. Using the names, date of birth and addresses of the victim and defendants in our study sample dataset (N=993), data were extracted directly from electronic datasets, when available, or manually retrieved using structured data abstraction forms. Regardless of data source, research staff and police clerks identified police reports for all incidents from 1999-2002 where (1) both the victim and defendant (the study couple) are listed as parties, or (2) property, drug, check welfare, disturbance, trouble with subject incidents included where the study victim is listed as a victim, and there is no identified defendant/perpetrator. The research team included qualifying police incidents regardless of whether the victim was listed in the role of the victim or in the role of the defendant for the incident.

United States Census 2000: The socioeconomic status (SES) variable was identified by using the defendant's address and United States Census on poverty rates. The poverty rate for the defendant's residential block group was used as a proxy for SES. Defendant address, rather than victim address, was used because the defendant address data were more reliable, and there was less missing information.

Protection Order Dataset: Data on protection orders (PO) were abstracted directly from the family court administrative records database. Only PO petitions that involved both members of the study couple (the victim and the defendant) were included in this abstraction. The research team accessed all family court records associated with each name (victim and defendant). Records appearing with the administrative code associated with protection order petitions and initiated between 1999 and 2002 were retrieved and reviewed to determine if the other party was the sample partner. Cases were included as a PO event if both parties were involved, regardless who was the petitioner and who was the respondent. Data abstracted and entered into the PO database included: role of victim (respondent or petitioner), petition date, whether hearing requested or ex parte order, order date, length of order, termination date, termination status (whether natural termination or by motion), violation date(s) and violation filing method (police report or only victim show-cause motion). Some study couples were involved in multiple petitions. All petitions meeting eligibility criteria were included.

Death Certificate Dataset: Data on date of death for victim and defendant were abstracted directly from the Kalamazoo County Clerk's electronic public death certificate database. Each study victim and each study defendant were searched using their name and date of birth. Only those deaths that occurred during the study period (1999-2002) were searched and recorded in the Death Certificate dataset.

• Rhodes, Karin V., Catherine Cerulli, Catherine L. Kothari, Melissa E. Dichter, Steve Marcus, and James Wiley. Victim Participation in Intimate Partner Violence Prosecution - Implications for Safety: Kalamazoo County, Michigan, 1999-2002. ICPSR30741-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2014-03-28. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR30741.v1

2014-03-28 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.