How is crime measured?

• There are three ways to measure crime:

  • Official statistics
  • Victim surveys
  • Self-report studies
• Official crime statistics - government statistics on crime based on official sources (e.g. police records)
• Key points of official crime statistics:

  • Published by the government
  • Useful in showing patterns and trends in offending
  • Secondary source of quantitative data
• What has been the trend in crime from: 

  1902 - 1950s: There was a gradual rise in recorded crime

  1950s - 1980s: The rise in recorded crime was steeper

  Mid 1980s - mid 1990s: There was a rapid increase in recorded crime

  Mid 1990s - 2015: There was a gradual decline annually in recorded crime
• Sociologists use official statistics because they:

  • provide useful data on crime
  • cheap and easily available resource
  • can show change over time
  • can compare crime between different areas
  • contain a large amount of information
  • can be combined with victim surveys and self-report studies to get a true picture of crime
• Sociologists use official statistics because they provide useful data on crime - they are collected by the government which means that they will have the data that has come from institutions such as the police to put together these official statistics
• Sociologists use official statistics because they are cheap and easily available resources - this is easy to access for anyone who needs it and it doesn’t cost much to find it so for a sociologist doing research this is useful because they don’t have to try and collect the statistics themselves because they can use the official statistics which have already been collected and they wouldn’t have to pay much for them.
• Sociologists use official statistics because they can show a change over time - these statistics can show how much crime has occurred in a certain place over a certain time which would make it easy for people looking for the statistics for things such as research and it would be easy for them to interpret the data and find patterns and trends in it.
• Sociologists use official statistics because they can compare crime between different areas - these statistics can be taken from all around the world or country and put into one document saying how much of different types of crimes have happened in different countries while saying which years/months these occurred in so that people looking at the statistics can easily interpret the data and find patterns and trends in it.
• Sociologists use official statistics because they contain a large amount of information - having all of this information in one place can make it easy for people to find the statistics that they are looking for as it is all in one place. However because it is all in one place it means that the document could be really large which means that it could also be difficult to find what you are looking for if you don’t know exactly what you need.
• Sociologists use official statistics because they can be combined with victim surveys and self-report studies to get a true picture of crime - this means that these statistics even though they won’t fully have a true picture of crime they will have a more true picture of the crime that is occurring in different places at different times than if they were only based off of reported crimes as not all crimes will get reported for multiple different reasons.