The National Crime Victimization Survey at Fifty: Introduction to the Special Issue

• Published date: 01 February 2025
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10439862241290697
• Author: Min Xie,James P. Lynch,Janet L. Lauritsen
• Date: 01 February 2025

https://doi.org/10.1177/10439862241290697

Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

2025, Vol. 41(1) 4 –8

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/10439862241290697

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Editorial

The National Crime

Victimization Survey at

Fifty: Introduction to the

Special Issue

The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is the world’s largest continuously

administered survey (1972–present) that collects data on crimes, victims, and responses

to victimization. It complements police crime statistics—the Uniform Crime Reporting

(UCR) Program’s Summary Reporting System (SRS) and the National Incident-Based

Reporting System (NIBRS)—by providing a more comprehensive understanding of

crime, including offenses unknown to the police. It records detailed information on

victims not available from the police, such as the household composition and socio-

economic characteristics of respondents that may expose them to or protect them from

victimization. It also records the circumstances of crimes by asking victims to describe

the incident characteristics, the harm of victimization, and their interactions with the

police, victim service workers, and other parts of the criminal justice system. Perhaps

as importantly, the survey provides data on samples of nonvictims that can be com-

pared to victims in an effort to understand victimization risk. The NCVS data have

revolutionized the way we study crimes in many ways, providing breakthroughs in our

understanding of crime. This special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Criminal

Justice is devoted to demonstrating the contributions of the NCVS over the past five

decades to crime measurement, theory, and practice. The survey has previously under-

gone methodological redesign and it is also doing so at the time of this writing. The

special issue thus also highlights recent activities and priorities for future work.

Creating a Quality National Data Source for Measuring

Victimization Across Time, Space, and Person and

Household Characteristics

David Cantor’s opening article in this special issue reviews the initiation and method-

ological developments of the NCVS over the past 50 years. Self-report surveys of

criminal victimization first appeared in the late 1960s and were regarded with suspi-

cion. The NCVS was initially informed by the results of pilot surveys in the 1960s

(Biderman et al., 1967; Ennis, 1967; Reiss, 1967), which demonstrated that crime was

prevalent enough to be measured with a household survey. Extensive methodological

work by private survey research firms, the National Criminal Justice Information and

Statistics Service (NCJISS, the predecessor of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, BJS),

1290697CCJXXX10.1177/10439862241290697Journal of Contemporary Criminal JusticeXie et al.

editorial2024