Uniform Crime Reporting Program Data: County-Level Detailed Arrest and Offense Data, 2013: Codebook
4. Methodology and Processing
Data Collection Methodology
Time Method: cross-section
Data Collector: United States Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation
Frequency of Data Collection: monthly
Mode of Data Collection: self-enumerated questionnaire
Characteristics of Data Collection Situation: The data for county-level detailed arrests and offenses
are submitted voluntarily by city, county, and state law enforcement agencies. Some agencies receive
forms directly from the FBI and return them directly to the FBI. Many others receive forms from state
collecting programs and return these forms to those programs. The state programs, in turn, forward
the reports to the FBI. Reports are sent out and collected on a monthly basis.
Control Operations: Once received, the FBI checks the agencies' reports for completeness and
arithmetical accuracy. If an unusual fluctuation is detected in an agency's crime count, the FBI
compares those counts with counts from previous reports or compares the frequencies to those of
agencies similar to the agency in question. When necessary, law enforcement agencies are contacted
to correct or explain the figures.
Dataset Availability
Location: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
Data Use Statement:
Citation Requirement: Publications based on ICPSR data collections should acknowledge those sources
by means of bibliographic citations. To ensure that such source attributions are captured for social
science bibliographic utilities, citations must appear in footnotes or in the reference section of
publications.
Deposit Requirement: To provide funding agencies with essential information about use of archival
resources and to facilitate the exchange of information about ICPSR participants' research activities,
users of ICPSR data are requested to send to ICPSR bibliographic citations for each completed manuscript
or thesis abstract. Visit the ICPSR Web site for more information on submitting citations.
4.2 Other Study Description Materials
Related Publication(s)
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crime in the United States: Uniform Crime Reports for the United
States. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, annually [2013].
