The Accuracy of Supplementary Homicide Report Rates for Large U.S. Cities

We investigated the precision of Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) homicide rate estimates for large U.S. cities during the 5 years, 1998-2002. The homicide rates based on the National Vital Statistics System provided a parallel measure and the basis for estimating the reliability and average erro...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inHomicide studies Vol. 19; no. 1; pp. 6 - 27
Main Authors Loftin, Colin, McDowall, David, Curtis, Karise, Fetzer, Matthew D.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.02.2015
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Subjects
Cities
Crime
Criminal statistics
Murders & murder attempts
United States > US
murder
National Vital Statistics System
reliability
crime statistics
homicide
measurement
Supplementary Homicide Report
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Summary:We investigated the precision of Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) homicide rate estimates for large U.S. cities during the 5 years, 1998-2002. The homicide rates based on the National Vital Statistics System provided a parallel measure and the basis for estimating the reliability and average error. When cities with incomplete SHR data were removed from the sample, the estimated reliability was high (.99), and the standard error of measurement was low (1.2 homicides per 100,000 residents). Reliability remained high for subsets of cities and for most subsets of victims. For some groups, however, such as African Americans and persons age 0 to 14, the reliability was much lower.
ISSN:1088-7679
1552-6720
DOI:10.1177/1088767914551984