Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The British Crime Survey, 2000: X4L SDiT Teaching Dataset (BCS) is a stripped-down version of the full BCS 2000 study held as study number 4463 at the UK Data Archive. The dataset is drawn from the 'non-victim' BCS data and contains just 33 variables, some broadbanded to protect respondent confidentiality. The dataset forms part of a wider SDiT project, which is accessible via the X4L - SDiT (Survey Data in Teaching) project web site. This project aimed to improve data literacy for students of survey methods and statistics. The full teaching materials and outputs from the project are available in the documentation table of this record (see below). The British Crime Survey (BCS) is one of the largest social surveys conducted in Britain. It is primarily a 'victimisation' survey, in which respondents are asked about the experiences of property crimes of the household (e.g. burglary) and personal crimes (e.g. theft from the person) which they themselves have experienced. (Note that the main British Crime Survey has now become the Crime Survey for England and Wales, but titles of older studies in the series remain the same.) Because members of the public are asked directly about victimisation, the BCS provides a record of the experience of crime which is unaffected by variations in the behaviour of victims about reporting the incident to the police, and variations over time and between places in the police practices about recording crime. The scope of the BCS goes well beyond the counting of criminal incidents, although it is for this estimate that it has become established as a definitive source of information. In order to classify incidents, the BCS collects extensive information about the victims of crime, the circumstances in which incidents occur and the behaviour of offenders in committing crimes. In this way, the survey provides information to inform crime reduction measures and to gauge their effectiveness. The BCS has been successful at developing special measures to estimate the extent of domestic violence, stalking and sexual victimisation, which are probably the least-reported to the police but among the most serious of crimes in their impact on victims.

Main Topics:

The main topics covered in the X4L dataset are fear of crime, assessment of police, and issues of 'crime and punishment'.

Multi-stage stratified random sample

Face-to-face interview

Self-completion

survey conducted using laptop computers (CAPI)