MEASURING CRIME SERIOUSNESS Lessons from the National Survey of Crime Severity

This paper considers strategies for studying crime seriousness, reviews the requirements for using magnitude estimation, reports a method study, and identifies problems in the US National Survey of Crime Severity (NSCS). Among those problems are: (1) most NSCS sub-group differences in crime perceptions are not interpretable because of the variant of magnitude estimation used in the NSCS; (2) their cross-modality laboratory studies are irrelevant to evaluating the adequacy of the NSCS method; (3) some of the NSCS results allow the interpretation that as many as a quarter of the respondents failed to make magnitude estimations; (4) the unsystematic introduction of status information in some NSCS items introduces variance which cannot be effectively assessed; and (5) the NSCS method for developing a crime index weighted by the seriousness of crimes is less feasible than other alternatives.