THE POTENTIAL FOR CRIME OVERREPORTING IN CRIMINAL VICTIMIZATION SURVEYS

A critique is offered of’ the methodology of the criminal victimization survey and several sources of error that may result in artificially inflated crime rates based on such data are identified. It is argued that much information about crimes given by respondents may be incorrect due to misunderstandings about what transpired, ignorance about legal definitions, memory failures about when crimes occurred, and outright prefabrication. Organizational imperatives that may cause interviewers and coders to skew the data toward a showing of greater criminality are analyzed. Some ideas for measuring response error more precisely are presented.