Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.The Scottish Crime and Justice Survey (SCJS) is a social survey which asks people about their experiences and perceptions of crime in Scotland. The survey is an important resource for both the government and public of Scotland. Respondents are selected at random from the Postal Address File and participation in the survey is entirely voluntary. The main aims of the SCJS are to:provide reliable statistics on people's experience of crime in Scotland, including services provided to victims of crimeassess the varying risk of crime for different groups of people in the populationexamine trends in the level and nature of crime in Scotland over timecollect information about people's experiences of, and attitudes on a range of crime and justice related issuesAn important role of the SCJS is to provide an alternative and complementary measure of crime to police recorded crime statistics. For further details of the scope and methodology of the SCJS, please see documentation. Information about the survey and links to publications may be found on the Scottish Government's Scottish Crime and Justice Survey webpages. Background and history of the SCJSPrevious surveys of victimisation in Scotland began with the Scottish components of the 1982 and 1988 sweeps of the British Crime Survey (BCS) (held at the Archive under SNs 4368 and 4599) The Scottish element of the 1988 BCS was also known as the Scottish Areas Crime Survey and coverage was limited in those early surveys to the areas south of the Caledonian Canal. From 2012, the BCS has been renamed the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) (held under GN 33174). The first independent Scotland-only crime survey was commissioned by the Scottish Office in 1993 under the title of the Scottish Crime Survey (SCS) and was followed by repeated sweeps in 1996 (both years held together under SN 3813), and again in 2000 (SN 4542) and 2003 (SN 5756). In 2004 the survey underwent both a name change, to the Scottish Crime and Victimisation Survey (SCVS) (SN 5757), and a major methodological change, with a move away from in-home face-to-face interviewing to telephone interviewing. However, the 2006 SCVS (SN 5784) returned to face-to-face interviewing after it was shown that the robustness of the data produced by the 2004 telephone survey could not be substantiated. From 2008-2009, the series name was changed to the present title, the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey, and it moved to a repeated annual cross-sectional schedule based on financial year. From 2012-13 the SCJS moved from annual to biennial survey covering the financial year however, the 2014-15 survey was the last biennial survey and currently the SCJS is conducted on an annual basis. See the documentation for further details. Special Licence dataFrom 2012-13 only the Main Questionnaire data are available under standard End User Licence (EUL) agreement. The Victim Form and Self-Completion data are available under Special Licence (SL). The SL data have more restrictive access conditions than those made available under the standard EUL. Prospective users of the SL version will need to complete an extra application form and demonstrate to the data owners exactly why they need access to the additional variables in order to get permission to use that version.
For the second edition (November 2009), new versions of the victim and non-victim form data files were deposited. Some revisions have been made to variables regarding offence coding, household theft/housebreaking categorisation, victimisation rates and incident recall. In addition, some variables have been relabelled to improve clarity, and a weighting variable to adjust for series incidents has been included. Further information may be found in the updated documentation to accompany the new edition.
Main Topics:
The 2006 SCVS questionnaire consisted of eight main modules, as follows:the main questionnaire, which covered a number of general topics. All the questions are relatively straightforward and were generally asked of all respondents. The first questions referred to Scotland as a whole and the focus then shifted to questions related to people’s own local area. The main topics included were: general problems in Scotland today; how long respondents had lived in their local area; how safe they felt in their area, and worries about crimethe screener questionnaire, in which all respondents were asked whether they had experienced certain types of incidents within a specified reference period, namely the time between the date of the interview and 1 April 2005victim forms for incidents identified at the screeners (up to a maximum of five)module A (answered by 50% of respondents, covering perceptions of crime levels in local area; perceptions and impact of anti-social behaviour in local area; whether respondent had been insulted or pestered since 1 April 2005, had ever been the victim of a violent attack, or a victim of workplace violence; attitudes to sentencing; and personal safety)module B (answered by the remaining 50% of respondents, and covering: contact with agencies in the Scottish criminal justice system (CJS); confidence in the Scottish CJS; contact with the police; awareness of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency; contact with the Procurator Fiscal; and whether respondent knows someone who has been to prison, or has been to prison themselves)demographicsself-completion module on drug use (answered by those aged 16-59)self-completion module on domestic violenceFor further details of coverage, see documentation.
Multi-stage stratified random sample
Face-to-face interview
Self-completion
Computer Assisted Personal Interview (CAPI) and Computer Assisted Self Interview (CASI) are used for the main questionnaires/victim forms and self-completion questionnaires respectively.
