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Sources of Homicide Data: A Review and Comparison (From Homicide: A Sourcebook of Social Research, P 75-95, 1999, M. Dwayne Smith and Margaret A. Zahn, eds. -- See NCJ-186214)

NCJ Number
186220
Author(s)
Marc Riedel
Date Published
1999
Length
21 pages
Annotation
This chapter describes and evaluates national sources of homicide data.
Abstract
The discussion focuses on murder and non-negligent manslaughter data from the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program of the FBI and homicide data from the mortality files of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). Also, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and its relation to the UCR Program are described. Following a description of each program, studies that use various intrasource comparisons to examine the data's reliability and validity are addressed. Another section of the chapter reviews research that considers intersource comparisons to determine similarities and differences between NCHS and UCR data. The chapter concludes that in general, the intrasource agreement for NCHS and UCR data is higher than the intersource agreement. Regarding the UCR Program, agreement between total homicides available from the UCR Program and what appears in the Supplementary Homicide Report is reasonably high. The imputation (estimation) methodology used by the UCR Program has received confirmation by outside researchers, but much more needs to be done to justify full confidence in the results. Two developments bode well for the future of research that uses both UCR and NCHS data sources. First, the greatest potential for extensive nationwide data on homicide remains with the development and further implementation of the NIBRS. Second, many of the data from both the NCHS and the UCR Program are or are becoming generally available at various places on the Internet and/or the National Archives of Criminal Justice Data. 3 figures, 2 tables, and 47 references

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