Combining Two Sources of Crime Data to Improve County-Level Estimation

• Activity Number: 653
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 7, 2014 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Survey Research Methods Section
• Author(s): Elizabeth Petraglia*+
• Companies: Ohio State University
• Keywords: Uniform Crime Reports ; National Crime Victimization Survey ; small-area estimation ; calibration estimator ; bias models

Abstract

Small-area crime trends are often of interest, but neither of the two most widely used sources of crime data provide reliable county-level estimates. The Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) collect voluntary submissions of crime data from police agencies. UCR was designed for national estimates of reported crimes, and due to missing data does not provide stable county estimates. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is a national survey which asks respondents about crimes over the past six months, including ones not reported to police. The NCVS public-use data does not have county identifiers. Most research in combining these two sources has focused on using UCR data to augment NCVS estimates, typically using linear regression. The proposed method uses direct UCR county-level estimates from agencies using the NIBRS reporting system adjusted for bias using NCVS estimates for corresponding victim age, sex, and large area domains. The weight placed on each data source is allowed to vary based on the quality of information available. This strategy allows for reasonable estimation of crime rates in all counties with largely complete UCR data using only the NCVS public-use files.