A New Measure of Prevalence for the National Crime Victimization Survey

Individuals age 12 or older participate in the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), providing an array of information related to their experiences of crime. This large-scale annual survey, administered by the U.S. Census Bureau on behalf of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, produces important measures of the extent of victimization in the United States. The NCVS’s design, however, poses unique challenges for calculating one such measure, the prevalence rate.