(PS12-C58) The Functional Impact of Violent Crime: Population Estimates in the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)

An extensive body of research provides evidence for the negative mental health impacts of violent crime. A growing movement, however, has called for increased attention to indices of objective functioning, with outcomes including employment and socioeconomic stability serving as primary variables of interest (e.g., McKnigh et al., 2009). Individuals exposed to criminal victimization are likely to experience a number of direct economic stressors attributable to medical care and lost earnings for missed work in addition to indirect effects associated with mental health sequela. Unfortunately, the limitations of routine methodologies make it difficult to determine the magnitude of effects in the general population or to examine specific factors that might exacerbate or mitigate outcomes in survivors of criminal trauma. Cross-sectional research has identified links between crime exposure and occupational impairment but failed to account for the temporal relation of these variables. Longitudinal studies, in turn, are limited to relatively small help-seeking and/or geographically restricted samples. Additional concerns include the tendency of studies to focus on single forms of victimization (e.g., domestic violence, sexual assault) and a general failure to account for individual (e.g. employment status, education) and community-level factors (e.g., employment opportunities, local economic conditions) that may moderate the impact of trauma exposure on socioeconomic functioning.

The current project aims to provide the first population estimates for the individual-level economic consequences of criminal trauma. Analyses will be conducted using person-level data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), a Bureau of Justice Statistics assessment serving as the primary source of information on criminal victimization in the U.S. Annual data collection includes a nationally representative sample of 160,000 unique respondents in 95,000 households. Households are retained for a 3 year period with members re-assessed at six-month intervals (7 timepoints). Responses target the frequency, characteristics, and consequences of nonfatal violent crimes (e.g., sexual assault, physical assault, robbery), including those reported and not reported to police. Measures of objective socioeconomic functioning (e.g., income, employment, employer type, length of residence) are also collected at each time point. Mixed-effects models for continuous, ordinal, count, and dichotomous outcomes in these data will examine (a) the impact of trauma exposure and lagged effects on functional outcomes controlling for respondent-level characteristics and (b) the unique and interactive effects of victimization status and exposure-related characteristics on socioeconomic outcomes.

Authors are in the process of analyzing NCVS microdata collected from 2006 to 2017, resulting in an effective sample of over 1,000,000 U.S. households. Given that analyses are ongoing and that the presentation of any results must first receive Census Bureau approval, preliminary data could not be included in the current abstract. However, full review of initial models will be finalized prior to November to allow for the formal release of results.