Juvenile Victimization: Convergent Validation of Alternative Measurements

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Abstract
Surveys of crime victims provide a valuable supplement to official record measures of serious crime, enabling a more complete picture of street crime levels and a more dynamic view of crime as interactions between offenders and victims. Initiated in 1973, the National Crime Survey (now called the National Crime Victimization Survey [NCVS]) provides a systematic, reliable, national assessment of crime and constitutes the preferred source of data for many analytic purposes. However, this article suggests that the NCVS is not equally reliable for all types of victims and offenses. The authors compare the NCVS profile of youthful victimization with comparable patterns of events from two other national data sets (the National Youth Survey and Monitoring the Future) that focus specifically on juveniles and their experiences. These comparisons indicate that young persons are less reliably represented in the NCVS due to such factors as sampling frame of the survey, form of the questionnaire interview, and wording of questions.