Ways of Measuring Crime

• what are official statistics?

  • Office for National Statistics is responsible for collecting a wide range of quantitative data on varying areas of interest.
  • It holds the information on current crime surveys carried out on victims, as well as those recorded by the police.
  • Some of the areas of crime covered include criminal damage, property crime, drug crime as well as physical and sexual crime.
• what are victim surveys?

  • It is a face-to-face survey which collects data from 50,000 households in the UK (2016/17), who are selected at random through a “postcode lottery”.
  • This means that not all households will be interviewed and also participants have the right to withdraw or refuse to be interviewed.
  • Adults and children are questioned on their experiences of crime and questions are followed up to obtain their attitudes on crime and the police, as well as to help identify those groups most at risk.
• what are offender surveys?

  • these surveys are designed to take information from offenders, often those in prison, in order to develop an understanding of the behaviour and attitudes of offenders.
  • The Offending Crime and Justice Survey (OCJS) was a longitudinal study carried out between 2003 and 2006.
  • It took data from a variety of areas including self-reported offending, indicators of recidivism (repeat offending) and the types of offences committed.
  • This kind of data helps researchers to identify potential risk factors and develop ways to prevent a person from becoming an offender
• evaluation of ways of measuring crime (1)

  • Official statistics are considered fairly limited as they are easily skewed by data which is omitted such as unreported crime and categories of crime which do not necessarily get brought up in a simple survey or questionnaire. This is why victim and offender surveys are considered useful as they can give more accurate details about crimes which may not get reported in the official statistics.
• evaluation of ways of measuring crime (2)

  • Another issue with surveys is that the company conducting the research may be given a random pool of participants to approach, but it is up to them whether or not they take part. On the CSEW website, they note that they must rely on the “goodwill” of individuals to agree to be a part of the research. This is a problem if many people decide that they don’t wish to, resulting in a diminished sample size.
• evaluation of ways of measuring crime (3)

  • Offender surveys are likely to be limited by the honesty of their respondents, perhaps even more so than victim surveys. However, there is debate over this as some argue that an offender may be more likely to be honest in order to use the information to their advantage, while others suggest that they will be reluctant to give up information that implicates another person.