A PATCHWORK OF DATA SETS
17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33
34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50
51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67
68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84
85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101
102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115
To study firearms and violence, researchers and policy makers rely on a
patchwork of data sources collected for more general purposes of monitoring
the nation’s health and crime problems. No authoritative source of
information exists to provide representative, accurate, complete, timely,
and detailed data on the incidence and characteristics of firearm-related
violence in the United States. Rather, there are many different sources of
data that researchers use to draw inferences about the empirical questions
of interest. Some information on firearms and violence is found in probability
samples of well-defined populations, such as the National Crime Victimization
Survey (NCVS) and the General Social Survey (GSS). Other information
comes from administrative data, such as the Uniform Crime Reports
(UCR) and the trace data of the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms
(BATF). Still other information comes from case studies, social experiments,
and other one-time surveys conducted on special populations. Table
2-1 lists characteristics of some of the commonly used data sources.
Perhaps because these data sets serve many purposes, the strengths and
limitations of each source have been generally well documented in the
literature.1 This section provides a brief description of the some of the key
data sources used in the research literature on firearms injury and violence
and discussed in the report. This summary is not an exhaustive treatment of
the data sources listed in Table 2-1, nor is it complete in its assessment of
the specific data sources considered. Rather, it is intended to provide relevant
background material on the key data.