DOI: 10.3886/icpsr06898.v1
title: Home Safety Project, 1987-1992: [Shelby County, Tennessee, King County, Washington, and Cuyahoga County, Ohio]
title: Version 1

description: The Home Safety Project was a population-based case control study of homicide in the home with control households matched to cases by victim age range, race, gender, and neighborhood (a proxy for socioeconomic status). The study was conducted in the following locations: Shelby County, Tennessee (August 23, 1987-August 23, 1992), King County, Washington (August 23, 1987-August 23, 1992), and Cuyahoga County, Ohio (January 1, 1990-August 23, 1992). The purpose of the data collection was to study risk and protective factors for homicide in the home and to identify individual and household factors associated with homicide (both behavioral and environmental). Respondents were asked a series of questions related to alcohol consumption, such as whether drinking ever created problems between household members, whether any household members had had trouble at work because of drinking, whether any physical fights or other violence had occurred in the home or outside the home due to drinking, and whether any injuries or hospital stays had resulted from drinking/fighting episodes. Additional queries covered whether any adult in the household had ever been arrested for any reason, whether anyone in the household used illicit drugs, and, if so, which ones. Questions on home safety features included whether the home had a burglar alarm, bars on the windows, exterior door deadbolt, security door, dogs, and any restricted access to the residence. Items on gun ownership covered whether there were any guns in the home and, if so, what type. Information also was elicited on the homicide that had taken place in the home, including whether the suspect was intimate with the victim, whether there was evidence of forced entry or entry without consent, whether the victim attempted to resist, and the respondent's assumption of the method of death as well as the medical examiner's determination. Demographic information includes victims' age, sex, and race, and respondents' age and sex. The unit of analysis is individual cases of homicide.
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS0: Study-Level Files 
 DS1: Homicide Data 
 DS2: Reduced Homicide Data
description: All individual identifiers were removed by the principal investigators to protect confidentiality.
description: All homicides in homes that involved residents of the three study counties (Shelby County, Tennessee, King County, Washington, and Cuyahoga County, Ohio) during the study interval. Any death that was ruled a homicide was included, regardless of method. Assaults were included if the victim died within three months due to injury.