DOI: 10.3886/icpsr04276.v4
title: National Crime Victimization Survey, 2004
title: Version 4

description: The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) Series, previously called the National Crime Surveys (NCS), has been collecting data on personal and household victimization through an ongoing survey of a nationally-representative sample of residential addresses since 1973. The NCVS was designed with four primary objectives: (1) to develop detailed information about the victims and consequences of crime, (2) to estimate the number and types of crimes not reported to the police, (3) to provide uniform measures of selected types of crimes, and (4) to permit comparisons over time and types of areas. The survey categorizes crimes as "personal" or "property." Personal crimes include rape and sexual attack, robbery, aggravated and simple assault, and purse-snatching/pocket-picking, while property crimes include burglary, theft, motor vehicle theft, and vandalism. Each respondent is asked a series of screen questions designed to determine whether she or he was victimized during the six-month period preceding the first day of the month of the interview. A "household respondent" is also asked to report on crimes against the household as a whole (e.g., burglary, motor vehicle theft). The data include type of crime, month, time, and location of the crime, relationship between victim and offender, characteristics of the offender, self-protective actions taken by the victim during the incident and results of those actions, consequences of the victimization, type of property lost, whether the crime was reported to police and reasons for reporting or not reporting, and offender use of weapons, drugs, and alcohol. Basic demographic information such as age, race, gender, and income is also collected, to enable analysis of crime by various subpopulations.
description: The data files include three weight variables: household, person, and incident. To use the weights correctly they must be adjusted. See the codebook for information on how to adjust the weights to calculate household, population, and victimization estimates.
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: Performed consistency checks.; Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: face-to-face interview, computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI) 
2008-12-17 This data collection has been deaccessioned and is no longer available. Replaced by study 22900.
Through 1999, the NCVS data were maintained under a single study number (ICPSR 6406). Beginning with the year 2000, files from individual years have separate study numbers. The NCVS data are organized by year, with six collection quarters comprising an annual file: the four quarters of the current year plus the first two quarters of the following year.
Data for the Part 1, 2004 Full File, are hierarchically structured, with four levels: Address ID, Household, Person, and Incident. The number of records and variables for each file, as well as the logical record length, can be found in the codebook.
The Incident-Level file in Part 2 was created from the hierarchical file and includes information on victims rather than nonvictims. Incident records were extracted from the full hierarchical file and bounded by the year that the incident occurred.
In contrast to previous years of NCVS, this particular data collection contains only the current year files: the full hierarchical file and the single-year incident-level file. A separate data collection, NATIONAL CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEY, 1992-YYYY: CONCATENATED FILES, contains the multi-year concatenated incident-level file and rape subset.
description: All persons in the United States aged 12 and over. Smallest Geographic Unit: region
description: Stratified multistage cluster sample.