Measuring crime: Victim Surveys (Forensic Psychology)

1.     VICTIM SURVEYS

A01:

Victim surveys involve asking people if they have been a victim of a crime within a specified period of time, and whether or not they reported it to the police. For example, the British Crime Survey – it is carried out every 2 years, and involves structured interviews with a large sample of people (aged 16+ from randomly selected households).

A03:

This method provides a more accurate picture of the rate of crime, as it includes crimes that have been unreported/unrecorded. This is supported by the fact that the Official Statistics’ crime rate is consistently lower than that of the British Crime Survey’s. This demonstrates that a lot of crimes go unreported and unrecorded which highlights the flaws in the Official Statistic’s method (suggesting it’s not truly representative of the extent of crime), which, in turn, is a strength of victim surveys as it counteracts and reduces such problems.

A03:

That said, victim surveys rely on respondents having an accurate recall of the crimes they have been a victim of. ‘Telescoping’ may occur, where a victim may misremember an event as happening in the past year when, in fact, it did not – perhaps because the trauma is fresh in the mind of the victim it seems to have occurred more recently than actually it did – and this may distort the figures as a result.