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Methods
Data are provided to the National Juvenile Court Data Archive by State and local agencies responsible for the collection and/or dissemination of juvenile justice data. The information contributed by these agencies is not derived from a probability sampling procedure, nor is it the result of a uniform data collection effort. The national estimates described in this Bulletin and in Juvenile Court Statistics are developed using information from all courts able to provide compatible data to the Archive. Although at least some 1997 data were provided by juvenile courts with jurisdiction over 97% of the U.S. juvenile population, not all of the information contributed to the Archive could be used to generate the national estimates because of incompatibilities in the structure or content of the data files. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) and the National Center for Juvenile Justice (NCJJ) continue to work to increase the number of compatible contributors to the Archive.
Data are provided to the Archive in two forms: automated case-level data and court-level aggregate data. Automated case-level data for 1997, which describe each case’s demographic and processing characteristics, were provided by 1,457 jurisdictions in 27 States (Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina,
South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia). Together, the contributing jurisdictions from these States contained 54% of the Nation’s juvenile population (i.e., youth age 10 through the upper age of original juvenile court jurisdiction in each State). Compatible court-level aggregate data for 1997, which usually indicate the number of delinquency cases disposed in a calendar year, were provided by an additional 584 jurisdictions in 9 States (California, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, New York, Oklahoma, Texas, and Vermont) and the District of Columbia. In all, compatible 1997 data were provided to the Archive by 1,983 jurisdictions, containing 71% of the Nation’s juvenile
population.
The national estimates of juvenile court cases reported in this Bulletin and in Juvenile Court Statistics 1997 were developed using the Archive’s case-level and court-level data files combined with county-level juvenile population estimates (controlling for the upper age of original juvenile court jurisdiction in each State). The basic assumption underlying the estimation procedure is that the volume and characteristics of juvenile court cases are shaped by the same set of factors in reporting and nonreporting jurisdictions of similar size. The national estimates described in this Bulletin include revisions made after publication of previous Juvenile Court Statistics Reports. For interested readers, a complete description of the estimation procedure appears in the “Methods” section of each Juvenile Court Statistics Report.
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| Offenders in Juvenile Court, 1997 |
Juvenile
Justice Bulletin • October 2000 |
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