University of New Hampshire Scholars\u27 Repository
Abstract
The National Juvenile Online Victimization Study (N‐JOV) was conducted by the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. Wave 1 of this study was funded by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the Office of Juvenile Justice & Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice. Wave 2 of this study was funded through grants from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice.
Researchers collected information from a national sample of law enforcement agencies about the prevalence of arrests for, and characteristics of, Internet sex crimes against minors in the criminal justice system in the 12 months following July 1, 2000 and again in calendar year 2006. The goal of this methodology was to : 1) utilize a representative national sample of law enforcement agencies that would give us an overall picture of these crimes in the United States, 2) understand how these cases emerged and were handled in a diverse group of agencies, 3) get detailed data about the characteristics of these crimes from well‐informed, reliable sources, and 4) see how the prevalence and characteristics of such crimes may have changed in a 5 to 6‐year time frame.
For both Waves 1 and 2, we used a two‐phase process to collect data from a national sample of the same local, county, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. In Phase 1, we sent mail surveys to a national sample of law enforcement agencies asking if they had made arrests for Internet sex crimes against minors in a specific one‐year time frame. In Phase 2, we conducted telephone interviews with law enforcement investigators about a sample of the arrest cases reported in the mail survey. The final data set, weighted to account for sampling procedures and other factors, includes data from 612 completed case‐level interviews from Wave 1 and 1,051 different completed case‐level interviews from Wave 2
