National Crime Surveys: National Sample, 1973-1983

The National Crime Survey (NCS), a study of personal and
household victimization, measures victimization for six selected
crimes, including attempts. The NCS was designed to achieve three
primary objectives: to develop detailed information about the victims
and consequences of crime, to estimate the number and types of crimes
not reported to police, and to provide uniform measures of selected
types of crime. The surveys cover the following types of crimes,
including attempts: rape, robbery, assault, burglary, larceny, and
auto or motor vehicle theft. Crimes such as murder, kidnapping,
shoplifting, and gambling are not covered. Questions designed to
obtain data on the characteristics and circumstances of the
victimization were asked in each incident report. Items such as time
and place of occurrence, injuries suffered, medical expenses incurred,
number, age, race, and sex of offender(s), relationship of offender(s)
to victim (stranger, casual acquaintance, relative, etc.), and other
detailed data relevant to a complete description of the incident were
included. Legal and technical terms, such as assault and larceny, were
avoided during the interviews. Incidents were later classified in more
technical terms based upon the presence or absence of certain
elements. In addition, data were collected in the study to obtain
information on the victims' education, migration, labor force status,
occupation, and income. Full data for each year are contained in Parts
101-110. Incident-level extract files (Parts 1-10, 41) are available
to provide users with files that are easy to manipulate. The
incident-level datasets contain each incident record that appears in
the full sample file, the victim's person record, and the victim's
household information. These data include person and household
information for incidents only. Subsetted person-level files also are
available as Parts 50-79. All of the variables for victims are
repeated for a maximum of four incidents per victim. There is one
person-level subset file for each interview quarter of the complete
national sample from 1973 through the second interview quarter in
1980.