Public Health and Criminal Justice Approaches to Homicide Research

Most criminologists acknowledge limited, but acceptable, uses for self-report survey techniques to measure common, non-serious offenses among youth. However, such techniques are likely to be challenged by critics for the study of serious violent crime. In fact, despite the availability of data on self-reports of violence in Monitoring the Future Surveys conducted for over a quarter of a century, there has been little systematic assessment of their utility in the study of variation in youth violence over time. This paper addresses the problems commonly cited as reasons for bypassing such data and compares temporal patterns using MTF data on self-reported assault and group fights to patterns based on UCR arrest data. Both types of data can be argued to tap similar underlying currents of violent crime.