NCJ Number
232647
Date Published
October 2010
Length
47 pages
Annotation
This report compares victimization statistics produced from the New Zealand Crime and Safety Survey 2006 (NZCASS) and the New Zealand General Social Survey 2008 (GSS), in order to determine whether the socio-demographic characteristics of victims in the surveys are similar.
Abstract
The GSS is a new survey released by Statistics New Zealand for the first time in October 2009. It is a multi-topic survey that addresses individual well-being and collects data on important social and economic outcomes. The GSS shows the inter-relationships between crime victimization and other factors, such as knowledge and skills, paid work, economic standard of living, physical environment, and social connectedness. The NZCASS is designed to collect crime and safety information from individuals in selected households, which allows investigation across crime topics, populations, and time. The analysis confirms that the GSS is achieving similar results as the NZCASS in terms of victimization patterns. The findings indicate that both GSS and NZCASS show higher victimization rates for the young (ages 15-24), Maori, renters, and people from the most deprived NZDep2001 quintile. Still, there were significant differences in the patterns when certain variables were examined. The NZCASS showed decreased victimization with each older age group, but only the 60 and over age group showed lower victimization in the GSS. For the Pacific ethnic group, NZCASS showed higher victimization than the total victimization rate, but GSS did not. Regarding gender, particularly for violence, the NZCASS showed similar victimization for males and females, but the GSS showed higher victimization for males. 2 tables, 15 figures, 16 references, and appended data on victims' judgments, calculations for the New Zealand General Social Survey, dataset variable names, and a table that compares the features of the 2 surveys