NCJ Number
158926
Date Published
1989
Length
36 pages
Annotation
This manual is intended to inform researchers about the data sets available in the National Juvenile Court Data Archive and the procedures to be used for obtaining access to them. ABST The Archive houses the automated records of cases handled by courts with juvenile jurisdiction. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention established the Archive to promote the research and policymaking potential of these data sets and to facilitate researcher access to them. The Archive currently contains more than 10 million automated case records. Most are juvenile delinquency and status offense records. Nearly all records contain demographic information on the youth, the offenses charged, the date of referral the processing characteristics of the case, and the case disposition. The manual describes the data sets in two categories: annual case-level files and birth cohort data files containing every case record in a juvenile's court career. Each listing has two parts. The first section contains information on the data supplier and how that agency collects and uses the data, the year of the earliest data housed in the Archive, and the approximate number of case records in an annual file or the approximate number of juvenile in a birth cohort file. The second part is a list of data elements with indications of the detail of the coding structures.