This document reports on findings from a research project that sought to develop and assess a new National Crime Victimization Survey instrument through a large-scale national field test; objectives included the improvement of the victimization screener and flow and logic of the instrument, as well as providing new measures of police performance and community safety, and expanded measures of correlates of victimization and victim help-seeking.
This report describes testing efforts to develop and assess a new National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) instrument. This testing was a part of the NCVS Instrument Redesign and Testing Project, a major multiyear effort to revamp the existing core survey instrument, which was last updated in 1992. The effort had three main goals: modernize the organization and content of the NCVS instrument, increase the quality of information collected and efficiency of the instrument flow, and improve the measurement and classification of crime. This report details findings from two experiments conducted as part of a large-scale national field test. The first experiment tested two different formats for letters sent to potential respondents, and the second experiment tested a promised incentive compared to no incentive to complete the questionnaire.