NCJ Number
98589
Date Published
1983
Length
167 pages
Annotation
This report examines the victim survey used in the six sites and provides site-by-site descriptive information.
Abstract
The six sites included Ventura County, Calif.; Washington, D.C.; Clayton County, Ga.; Ada County (Boise), Idaho; Oklahoma County, Okla.; and Dane County, Wis. The victim survey probed victims' recollections, attitudes, and perceptions in five major areas: recollections of the offense for which a youth was adjudicated and randomly assigned to a restitution program or control group in each of the six intensive sites, satisfaction with the restitution order and receipt of the restitution, victims' attitudes toward the juvenile justice system in general, victims' fear of crime and perceptions of juvenile delinquency causes, and victims' attitudes toward restitution in general. At each of the six sites, onsite data coordinators collected the names of those victims of the juvenile offenders under study in the national evaluation. Victim information was collected only for offenders' referral offenses, not for prior offenses. The first surveys were administered to victims in June 1979 in Dane County, Wis., and the last surveys occurred in September 1982 in Oklahoma County, Okla. Both in-person interviews and telephone interviews were used to collect the data. However, beginning in July 1981, a centralized data collection method, called AUTOTRAK, was instituted. The average rate of victim survey response was 30.8 percent or 28.7 percent (depending upon which of two measures are used to do the calculations). Findings of the victim survey for each of the six sites are presented, but no comparisons between these sites were attempted. Tabular data and the victim survey instrument are included.