Assignment:
Juvenile Offending Data Collection Options
1. Official data, primarily arrest numbers, are gathered by police agencies and complied into official sources by various entities of the Department of Justice, such as the FBI summary we know as the UCR or other sources noted below.
Official data can be easily located through the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). See the links at the bottom of the page that permit you to download the raw data into an Excel worksheet, which would allow you to focus the analysis on a specific offense or era.
You can use Excel to do your calculations and create your own original graphic (chart) to include in your narrative, or you may gather raw data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Using the tabs available to you under the Data Analysis Tool on the OJJDP website, you can access the information in any combinations that are interesting to create subgroups. These can be compared by sex, age, type of offense, race, state, or over a period of time. You could make a trend analysis of one specific type of offense or compare the trends indicated for males and females. For the comparison that you have chosen for analysis, you will write a paragraph that describes:
a. the most recent arrest numbers compared to five years ago and 20 years ago
b. the rate of delinquency (the rate is different than raw numbers and must be calculated), and
c. the general trend of delinquency (for your chosen subgroup) beginning around 1990 until present.
2. Victim data that are primarily drawn from large-scale surveys are another option. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is the most comprehensive and well known.
3. Self-reported data are gathered from many different forms of questionnaires and surveys that ask juveniles, or sometimes a selected group of juveniles, about their offending history, the age at which these activities occurred, and with whom they were offending.
Tip: In order to calculate the rate of delinquency, you may find it helpful to have the UCR data tool for the same period. By knowing how many crimes were committed and how many juveniles were arrested, you can then know about the rate of delinquency. The link below will provide the UCR Data.