The State Justice Statistics (SJS) Program is designed to maintain and enhance each state's capacity to address criminal justice issues through collection and analysis of data. The SJS Program provides support to each state to coordinate and conduct statistical activities within the state, conduct research to estimate impacts of legislative and policy changes, and serve as a liaison in assisting BJS to gather data from respondent agencies within their states.
The South Carolina Statistical Analysis Center (SAC) was established in 1973 under the Comprehensive Data Systems program. The goal of this program was to establish a state level capacity for criminal justice data collection and analysis in order to better inform the public and policy makers. The SAC is located in the Office of Highway Safety and Justice Programs (OHSJP). OHSJP, among its myriad duties, functions as the State Administrative Agency (SAA). The SAC has developed and maintained close working relationships with other criminal justice agencies by undertaking research and evaluation projects. The primary function of the SAC in South Carolina is to provide policy relevant information and data analysis to inform the public and policy makers.
The SC SAC proposes to conduct the first year of a three-year project that investigates and improves SCIBRS data quality issues to assess the validity and integrity of the data provided. The SC SAC will look in-depth at SCIBRS intimate-partner violent crime data provided by counties across the state to examine the quality of the data. The priority of the first year would be for the SC SAC to employ different methods to identify counties with SCIBRS intimate-partner violent-crime victimization rates that were either higher or lower than expected over a period of five years from 20102014. In year one (1), the major deliverables will include maps of domestic violence resources, a policy brief, a report about modeling the county data that will be submitted to a peer-reviewed academic journal and a report on known SCIBRS data quality issues.
In year two (2), the SCIBRS contractor will drilldown from the counties identified to the level of individual reporting agencies. For these agencies, the SCIBRS contractor would conduct a data integrity investigation. Upon conclusion of this investigation, the SCIBRS contractor would determine which method (the method of the SC SAC or that of the academic contractor) identified the counties with the most serious SCIBRS reporting issues. Thus, the preference for one method over another would be evidence-based, and cost-effectiveness would be determined.
In year three (3), the SCIBRS contractor would transition identification of issues in year two (2) to the implementation of effort to improve data quality. This process, consisting of outreach and targeted training, would be guided by results from the second-year drilldown investigation. Meanwhile, the inferential statistical modeling would continue by determining how robust the modeling was to different definitions of domestic violence (second year), and by estimating the magnitude of the relationship between unemployment and SCIBRS intimate-partner victimization over the fifteen years from 20002014 (third year), which would cover the period before, during, and after the recession. (CA/NCF)
Note: This project contains a research and/or development component, as defined in applicable law.
