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Initially funded in 2013 by the National Institute of Justice, the primary purpose of this project was to conduct a randomized-control test of the impact of a victim-focused, forensic collaborative relative to usual care (UC) on older adult victims' health, mental health, and criminal justice outcomes. During the course of the project, researchers responded to enrollment and consent challenges by implementing Arm 2 that focused on collecting caseworker and victim advocate perceptions of cases as well as administrative data from Adult Protective Services (APS).

This collection contains 6 datasets:

• Arm 1 (DS1) contains survey results from victim-focused interviews of 40 older adults who were reported to be victims of abuse, neglect, and/or financial exploitation over 4 time points. Variables describe victim and case characteristics, service use/needs, risk factors for abuse, consequences of abuse and exploitation, and criminal justice process and outcomes.
• Arm 2 (DS2) includes a survey of APS caseworkers reporting on a case of older adult abuse, such as client (older adult victim) and perpetrator demographics, mistreatment details (verbal abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, financial exploitation, and/or housing exploitation), and service use.
• Collateral assessments (DS3) surveyed a trusted individual related to the older adult respondent in Arm 1. This included data on the perceptions of the older adult's functioning and use of services; and the quality of decision-making procedures, desired treatment, and outcomes in the criminal justice system. Of the 40 Arm 1 participants interviewed, 33 gave collateral contact information. Of those 33, 16 could not be reached, one failed the consent quiz, and two declined to participate. Of the 14 who participated in an initial interview, only three participated at the follow-up nine months later.
• Revictimization and Prosecutorial Outcome Data (DS5) includes information on new incidents reported to law enforcement over the nine months following the original incident report and prosecution outcomes, gathered from publicly-accessible police reports and court information for Arm 1 and Arm 2 cases.
• APS administrative data (DS6), such as the demographics of the older adult victim and the primary perpetrator, assessment scores for risk and safety, the alleged mistreatment type, whether mistreatment was substantiated, and APS case status. The data included overall risk/safety scores and summary scores for the domains of physical functioning, environmental context, financial resources, mental health, cognition, medical issues, and mistreatment.

Arm 1 demographic variables includes age, gender, education, employment status, marital status, household size, ethnic minority, and income source. Arm 2 surveys reported ethnicity, gender, age, education, marital status, and employment status; APS data reported age and gender.

The purpose of the completed project was to follow the first National Elder Mistreatment Study (NEMS), which provided prevalence estimates, with a second study of a subset of the same participants to measure the effects of elder abuse in terms of (1) health and mental health outcomes and (2) criminal justice system participation and satisfaction, as well as to specify additional predictors of these effects. Data were collected from 774 older adults 8 years following their participation in Wave I of the NEMS. This represented the results of contacting every locatable participant who reported psychological, physical, or sexual (but not financial) abuse at Wave I (achieved subsample n = 183 of the original 753 Wave I victims) and a comparison sample of 591 randomly selected Wave I non-victims from the remaining 2,149 working phone numbers of the original 5,024 non-victims (at Wave I). As mentioned, financial abuse classification at Wave I was not used to identify the victim subgroup prior to sampling, however retrospective analysis indicated that the two aforementioned sampling groups (every working phone number of Wave I victims of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse AND every working phone number of the 2,149 comparison Wave I participants) accounted for all but 7 financial abuse victims identified as such at Wave I (i.e., no other financial abuse victims at Wave I could have possibly been re-contacted). The cooperation rate (upon contact), for Wave I victims of psychological, physical, or sexual abuse was 66 percent; the cooperation rate of comparison Wave I participants was 57 percent. (Note: it had originally been proposed to conduct propensity matching once the sample of Wave I victims was re-contacted, however by conserving funds during this first phase, the study was able to expand from propensity matching to random selection of a much larger group of over 2,149, for a final derived sample of 774.)