African American Experience of Sexual Assault in Maryland, 2003-2006 (ICPSR 25201)
The purpose of this study was to better understand the problem of sexual assault among African American women in Maryland, assess their use of available resources in response to sexual assault, and explore their use of alternative sources of care. Researchers interviewed 223 female victims of sexual assault (Part 1 and Part 2) between January 2004 and July 2005 and conducted 21 focus groups (Part 3) with sexual assault resource service providers between 2003 and 2006. Criteria for inclusion in the interview component (Part 1 and Part 2) of the study included: African American or Caucasian female, aged 18 and over, resident of Maryland, and victim of sexual assault. There were four streams of recruitment for the interview portion of the study:
- Victims receiving services at one of 18 rape crisis centers located throughout the state of Maryland;
- Community outreach sessions conducted by rape crisis center community educators;
- Through community service providers, including those working in domestic violence centers, forensic nurse examiners (SAFE programs), probation and parole offices, reproductive health centers, county health departments, community services agencies, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and local colleges; and
- Through three detention centers housing female inmates.
For Part 3 (Focus Group Qualitative Data), rape crisis center representatives and other community service provider representatives received a letter informing them that a focus group was going to be conducted at the end of their study training session and asked them for their participation. Part 1 (Victim Quantitative Data) includes items in the following categories: Personal Demographics, Details of the Sexual Assault, Medical Care, Law Enforcement, Prosecution/Court Process, Sexual Assault Center Services, Other Counseling Services, and Recommendations for Improvement. Part 2 (Victim Qualitative Data) includes responses to selected questions from Part 1. The data are organized by question, not by respondent. Part 3 (Focus Group Qualitative Data) includes questions on the needs of African American women who have been sexually assaulted, whether their needs are different from those of women of other racial/ethnic backgrounds, unique barriers to reporting sexual assault to police for African American women and their treatment by the criminal justice system, unique issues concerning the use of available resources by African American women, such as post-rape medical care and counseling services, and recommendations on how the state of Maryland could improve services for African American women who are the victims of sexual assault.
Capturing Human Trafficking Victimization Through Crime Reporting, United States, 2013-2016 (ICPSR 37907)
Despite public attention to the problem of human trafficking, it has proven difficult to measure the problem. Improving the quality of information about human trafficking is critical to developing sound anti-trafficking policy. In support of this effort, in 2013 the Federal Bureau of Investigation incorporated human trafficking offenses in the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. Despite this achievement, there are many reasons to expect the UCR program to underreport human trafficking. Law enforcement agencies struggle to identify human trafficking and distinguishing it from other crimes. Additionally, human trafficking investigations may not be accurately classified in official data sources. Finally, human trafficking presents unique challenges to summary and incident-based crime reporting methods. For these reasons, it is important to understand how agencies identify and report human trafficking cases within the UCR program and what part of the population of human trafficking victims in a community are represented by UCR data. This study provides critical information to improve law enforcement identification and reporting of human trafficking.
Coding criminal incidents investigated as human trafficking offenses in three US cities, supplemented by interviews with law and social service stakeholders in these locations, this study answers the following research questions:
- How are human trafficking cases identified and reported by the police?
- What sources of information about human trafficking exist outside of law enforcement data?
- What is the estimated disparity between actual instances of human trafficking and the number of human trafficking offenses reported to the UCR?
Evaluation of the Domestic Violence Homicide Prevention Demonstration Initiative: Collaboration Surveys, 5 U.S. states, 2015-2019 (ICPSR 38133)
The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and the Office for Violence Against Women (OVW) has evaluated the implementation process and impact of the U.S. Department of Justice's Domestic Violence Homicide Prevention Demonstration Initiative. The evaluation was conducted by a team of investigators from Yale University and Michigan State University.
The demonstration initiative (DI) included 3 implementation sites (California, North Carolina and Illinois). In addition, 2 comparison or typically implementing sites (Michigan and Tennessee) were included in the evaluation. The sites implemented the Lethality Assessment Program (LAP) developed by the Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence.
A web-based survey was used to gather data to assess changes in collaboration within each of the sites. Respondents from agencies providing support to victims of domestic violence and their offenders reported on their level of collaboration with other named agencies in their networks at two or three time points. Data sets are at the site level. Social network analysis was conducted to assess how the network changes over time.
Evaluation of the Healthy Families New York Home Visiting Program, Age Seven Follow Up, 2007-2009 (ICPSR 30441)
Healthy Families New York (HFNY), which was based on the Healthy Families America (HFA) model, was established as a strengths-based, intensive home visitation program with the explicit goals of promoting positive parenting skills and parent-child interaction; preventing child abuse and neglect; supporting optimal prenatal care, and child health and development; and improving parent's self-sufficiency.
In 2000, a randomized controlled trial was initiated at three sites with the HFNY home visiting program. Families eligible for HFNY at each site were randomly assigned to either an intervention group that was offered HFNY services or to a control group that was given information on and referral to appropriate services other than home visiting. Baseline interviews were conducted with 1,173 of the eligible women (intervention, n=579; control, n=594), and follow up interviews at Years 1, 2, and 3. In addition to data gathered during the follow up interviews, information regarding study participants' involvement in reports of child maltreatment was also extracted and coded from Child Protection Services records.
For the current study, mothers in both the intervention and control groups were re-interviewed at the time of the target child's seventh birthday. Interviews (Dataset 1: Mother Interview Data, n=942) included information about parenting, the child, earnings, and household composition. Interviewers also completed face-to-face assessments (Dataset 2: Target Child Interview Data) with 800 of the children who were born and reached the age of 7 at the time of interview. The target child interviews assessed children's receptive vocabulary skills, emotional health, self-regulatory abilities, and problem behaviors. The research team also extracted or obtained administrative data pertaining to Child Protective Service reports, foster care placements, federal and state supported benefits, and programs services and costs (Datasets 3-8).
Evaluation of the Linking Systems of Care for Children and Youth Demonstration Project, Illinois, Montana, Ohio, and Virginia, 2015-2019 (ICPSR 37310)
Evaluation of the Office for Victims of Crime Wraparound Victim Legal Assistance Network Demonstration Project, 5 U.S. states, 2013-2018 (ICPSR 38187)
The Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) created a new demonstration grant program, the OVC Wraparound Victim Legal Assistance Network Demonstration Project, to address the wide range of legal needs victims of crime have in relation to the victimization they experienced. The original four-year demonstration, which was increased to six years, included two phases: (1) a 15-month phase for planning, designing a new service delivery model in collaboration with local partners, and conducting a needs assessment, and (2) a second phase for grantees to implement the model as designed. The program originally funded six sites to plan and implement a new model of legal assistance for victims:
- Alaska Immigrant Justice Center (entire state of Alaska)
- Council on Crime and Justice (entire state of Minnesota)
- Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles (Los Angeles County, California)
- Lone Star Legal Aid (72 counties in East Texas)
- Metropolitan Family Services' Legal Aid Society (Cook County, Illinois)
- Rocky Mountain Victim Law Center (City of Denver, Colorado)
The new wraparound service delivery models were expected to facilitate the implementation of wraparound pro bono legal assistance networks to provide legal services to victims. Because victims often receive legal services from a variety of uncoordinated organizations (e.g., victim legal clinics for help with enforcing rights, and legal aid offices or law school clinics for help with other specific civil legal needs), integrated networks may be better able to provide a wide array of legal services from a single, coordinated system. The demonstration grant requirements included: creating and actively engaging a steering committee, working cooperatively with technical assistance provider(s) as needed, and employing a local research partner to help perform the needs assessment and work closely with the evaluation team.
Evaluation of the Statewide Automated Victim Information and Notification (SAVIN) Program [United States], 2010-2012 (ICPSR 34593)
These data are part of NACJD's Fast Track Release and are distributed as they there received from the data depositor. The files have been zipped by NACJD for release, but not checked or processed except of the removal of direct identifiers. Users should refer to the accompany readme file for a brief description of the files available with this collections and consult the investigator(s) if further information is needed.
The purpose of the study was to evaluate the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) Statewide Automated Victim Information and Notification (SAVIN) program; evaluate victims' awareness and use of automated victim notification (AVN) systems and the role service providers play in ensuring that victims are aware of, and able to successfully register for, AVN services. Researchers conducted three waves of telephone interviews with automated victim notification (AVN) system administrators (AVN System Administrator Interview Data, n=52), including those in states not participating in the BJA SAVIN program. Researchers also interviewed individuals overseeing victim notification services in states without AVN. Researchers also created two online surveys to supplement the information collected in the telephone interviews (Survey of Service Providers, n = 1,246). Finally, Researchers contacted selected service providers via email and telephone to inform them that they had been identified to participate in the survey of victims (Survey of Victims Data, n=1,355) and asked to confirm their participation. Participating service providers displayed the surveys in a public area where they could be completed by anyone visiting the office for an issue related to victim services. To encourage participation from victims who did not receive in-office services, the research team gave providers a sample email (in both English and Spanish) that they could provide to remote clients with information about how to access the online survey. The research team fielded the survey for three months in 2012, with reminder emails sent to participating providers on a bi-weekly basis.
New York City Trafficking Assessment Project, 2007-2008 (ICPSR 31601)
Research on Pathways to Desistance [Maricopa County, AZ and Philadelphia County, PA]: Calendar Data, 2000-2010 [Restricted] (ICPSR 32282)
The Calendar data files are comprised of 47 total parts spread across 13 distinct topical domains.
- Academic Achievement
- Antisocial Activity
- Community-Based Services
- Contact With the Justice System
- Court Monitoring
- Gainful Activity
- Head Injury
- Living Situation
- Making and Spending Money
- Medication
- Out of Community Placement
- Romance
- School
Each topical domain contains multiple reference periods for looking at the topic across the entire data collection period of the study.
Users who request these restricted data should first review the documentation available from NAHDAP (user guide and frequency codebooks) and from the Pathways Website (domain content codebooks). This review will help determine which specific datasets will be needed for your project. The "Research Description" in ICPSR's Data Access Request System (IDARS) must include a specific explanation of why you need each topic domain selected on the "Data Selection" page in IDARS. Most projects should only require one reference period per topic domain being requested. Data requests for all reference periods within a given domain will not be approved without a satisfactory explanation of why all of the reference periods are required for your project. Since the Calendar data collection is very extensive and Restricted Data Use Agreements are only for 2 years, data requests are not expected to need the entire Calendar data collection.
The Pathways to Desistance study was a multi-site study that followed 1,354 serious juvenile offenders from adolescence to young adulthood in two locales between the years 2000 and 2010. Enrolled into the study were adjudicated youths from the juvenile and adult court systems in Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona (N=654) and Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania (N=700).
Respondents were enrolled and baseline interviews conducted from November 2000 to January 2003. Follow-up interviews were then scheduled with the respondents at 6, 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 48, 60, 72 and 84 months past their baseline interview.
The enrolled youth were at least 14 years old and under 18 years old at the time of their committing offense and were found guilty of a serious offense (predominantly felonies, with a few exceptions for some misdemeanor property offenses, sexual assault, or weapons offenses).