NCVS (National Crime Victimization Survey)
Definition
The principal victimisation survey in the United States, administered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics since 1973. Interviews approximately 240,000 individuals in a rotating household sample each year about experiences of personal and property crime.
- Full name
- National Crime Victimization Survey
- Country
- United States
- Administered by
- Bureau of Justice Statistics
- Running since
- 1973
- Sample size
- About 240,000 individuals annually
Common questions
Why does the US maintain a victimisation survey alongside police-reported crime statistics?+
Not all crime is reported to police, so NCVS captures incidents victims experienced regardless of whether they filed a report, which lets researchers estimate the gap between reported and actual crime, known as the dark figure of crime, in a way that police records alone cannot.
Does NCVS cover homicide?+
No, because it interviews living respondents about their own victimisation experiences, so it cannot capture homicide. Murder statistics come instead from police-reported data sources such as the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting program.
Related terms
- CSEW (Crime Survey for England and Wales)
- The principal victimisation survey in England and Wales, conducted by the Office for National Statistics since 1982. Interviews around 35,000 adults annually...
- Dark Figure of Crime
- The gap between the actual volume of crime and the amount recorded in official statistics. Crimes go unrecorded when victims do not...
- Self-Report Study
- A research method in which respondents are asked to disclose offences they have committed, whether or not those offences resulted in arrest...
- Telescoping
- A memory error in which respondents misplace events in time, typically drawing incidents from outside the reference period into it (forward telescoping),...
- Victimisation Survey
- A survey that asks a random population sample about crimes experienced in a reference period, regardless of whether those incidents were reported...