History of Victimization Summarys.
... that happened in certain areas in a 12 month period. The researchers would also isolate the 2 most recent and most serious incidents and go into great detail about them with the participant. This survey had an unforeseen side effect; the researchers discovered that some of the people who had been victimized never reported the crime. It was then realized that this could became a way to combat the “dark figure of crime”. When this survey was published it claimed that the UCER underreported the amount of crime that was present in the United States. It did have a more accurate number when it came to the amount of crime, but there were a few problems with it. The problems that occurred from the NORC survey were telescoping, including the wording of the questions, and memory decay. These problems were addressed when the second generation of victim surveys came around. The second generation surveys were just concentrated in Washington DC and Boston Areas; and were centered on figuring out how to combat the problems of memory decay, recall and telescoping. To figure out how serious the problem of memory recall and decay was, the interviewers performed both forward and reverse record checks. A forward record check is when the researcher gathers information from the respondent and then tries to comb through police records to find the report. A reverse record check is the exact opposite. It starts with the police report, and after reviewing the report, the respondent is interviewed and then the information is compared to see how accurately the victim remembers what happened. This worked well for determining a victim’s memory recall, but it also gave life back to the “dark figure of crime”. This was because the interviewers were only relying on police reports to determine who they wanted to interview and were leaving out the ones who had not reported their victimization. To fix the problem of reporting events out of order, or telescoping, a panel design was used to keep track of how a victim’s story would change over time. This was accomplished by interviewing the respondent’s routinely over a period of time. The results showed that people were able to recall an event more accurately at 6 months after it occurred then 12 months later. Once the problems with recall and telescoping were identified, the surveys moved into the third generation of victim surveys. This generation was characterized by the launch of three major surveys; a national victimization survey, a survey of commercial business, and a survey of special victimization. The National Crime Survey targeted 72,000 households in 1972 and conducted interviews with each member of the household every six months for three years. The results included seven interviews per household that were compared to each other, especially to the initial interview, for accuracy. It also helped to track, in more detail, how the wording of questions and time could affect a person’s memory of the order of events that happened the night of the crime. The commercial business survey gathered information from businesses to assess their level of risk. The problem with this was that the number of businesses interviewed was too small to give reliable information. It was also costing a bunch of money to perform these surveys without much of a payoff in return. The business surveys were quickly killed in 1977. Finally, the special victimization surveys were conducted in 26 large cities and included both residential and business surveys. The common finding when conducting this type of survey was that it was producing the ...