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                            Library & Multimedia
 Measuring Victimization Inside Prisons: Questioning the Questions
NCJ Number
              237131

Author(s)
          Ronet Bachman, Jing Shi, Nancy Wolff
Date Published

October 2008
Length
              20 pages
Annotation
              This study explored the importance of question wording when attempting to measure sexual and physical victimization.
Abstract
              Violence and victimization inside the prison setting are accepted as facts, although the facts about their prevalence remain uncertain. Variation in the methods used to estimate rates of sexual and physical victimization contribute to the wide range in estimates appearing in the prison literature. This article focuses on the questions used in the prison victimization literature to elicit information on victimization from inmates, compared to questions used in the general victimization literature. The questions used in the National Violence Against Women and Men Surveys are used to estimate sexual and physical victimization rates for an entire prison system. Rates of victimization were found to vary significantly by specificity of the question, definition of perpetrator, and clustering of behaviors. Facts about victimization inside prison will become more certain when the methodology becomes more standardized and consistent with definitions of victimization. (Published Abstract)
      
  
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Date Published: October 1, 2008
    
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                Violence against Women
        Prisons
        Cluster analysis
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        Interview and interrogation



  
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