The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) maintains a research program known as the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) that measures and tracks nonfatal victimizations in the United States. The NCVS is an official source of crime data and the primary source of unreported crime. It collects detailed information on the frequency and nature of several offenses, including: rape, robbery, aggravated assault, simple assault, larceny, burglary, trespassing, motor vehicle theft, and other types of household theft.
Recently, BJS has undertaken several efforts to increase the efficiency, reliability, and utility of the NCVS. First was a revamp in the urbanicity measure used to classify areas as rural, suburban, or urban. Second, the NCVS also began collecting subnational estimates to help make data more precise. Third, the NCVS survey was completely re-designed to help improve validity of the estimates. Based on recently released reports, it appears that the revised version of the NCVS shows clear improvements over the previous version. In this post, I will discuss these improvements (and why they matter) in more detail.
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