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Как изучать жертв преступлений?
This paper reports on the methodology of the first Russian representative victimization survey (the data is publicly available online). Victimization surveys are conducted to analyze the crime structure, socio-demographic characteristics of victims, crime circumstances, the behavior of victims and law enforcement agents. In world practice, there are two main national victimological studies — NCVS in the US and CSEW in the UK, both conducted annually or even more often since the 1970s — 1980s. However, up to date, there were no victimization surveys in Russia conducted in the same way. Previous victimization surveys either include the minimum of questions about victimization experience or were conducted on very small samples and did not allow to have reliable estimates for the number of victims or discover the crime structure and patterns of post-victimization behavior in a reliable way. The victimization survey we present (Russian Crime Victimization Survey - RCVS) based on CATI technology and simple random sample that represents the population of the Russian Federation (no quotas have been used). We interviewed 16818 persons, out of which 3001 admitted being victimized during the last 5 years, 3719 answered, that they did not have victim experience but were asked detailed questions about social and demography background, and 10098 also answered, that they did not have victimization experience and proceed only with questions about sex, age, and place of living. The questionnaire is mainly composed of dichotomous questions, so circumstances of a crime can be reconstructed and described according to Russian legal discourse (as common descriptions of crimes in Russia sometimes differ from legal ones). In the paper, we describe in detail and substantiate the used methodological solutions, and show its connection with other victimization surveys in the world.