This report on the development and testing of improvements to the National Crime Victimization Survey, discusses the potential for including a memory aid component into the NCVS.
This document provides a final report on findings from research that sought to determine how contextual information in a survey can improve two aspects of quality: recall of crime events and respondent engagement in the survey. The four phases of the project are presented in three chapters: chapter one reports on Phase I, literature review and data analysis, to improve data quality in the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS); Phases II and III are presented in chapter two of the report and include the development of memory aids to supplement the NCVS screening questions; and chapter three discusses Phase IV, or field testing of the Survey of Crime Victimization (SCV); and finally, a list of references is provided. The authors discuss the purpose behind their research, their findings, and key differences between the NCVS and the SCV, as well as limitations of the study.