DOI: 10.3886/icpsr26382.v1
title: National Crime Victimization Survey, 2008 [Record-Type Files]
title: Version 1

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 several weight variables used to calculate national estimates of: households, persons, victimizations, and incidents. The codebook describes how to use the weights.
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.; Created variable labels and/or value labels.; Standardized missing values.; Performed recodes and/or calculated derived variables.; Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS0: Study-Level Files 
 DS1: Address Record-Type File 
 DS2: Household Record-Type File 
 DS3: Person Record-Type File 
 DS4: Incident Record-Type File 
 DS5: 2008 Incident-Level Extract File
description: National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) Series
description: computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI), face-to-face interview, telephone interview 
The 2008 Incident-Level Extract File was created from the record-type files and includes information on victims of crime. Nonvictims are not included. Records were extracted from the Incident Record-Type File and bounded by the year that the incident occurred. These records were then merged to their parent records from the Person Record-Type and Household Record-Type files.
The data were collected by the United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census.
description: All persons in the United States aged 12 and over. Smallest Geographic Unit: region
description: Stratified multistage cluster sample.