Measuring violent victimization: Rural, suburban, and urban police notification and emergency room treatment

Abstract

The goal of this study was to determine the rate at which police are notified of violent victimizations in rural areas, the rate at which victims of violence in rural areas receive emergency room (ER) treatment for their injuries, if these two rates are related to each other, and if these two rates are similar to corresponding rates across rural, suburban, and urban locations. Substantively, these analyses allow us to test arguments suggesting police notification of criminal victimization is lower in rural relative to non-rural areas. Methodologically, these analyses provide insight into patterns of seeking medical treatment for violent victimization. We obtained data from the 1996–2005 United States National Crime Victimization Survey on victims of serious violence who had been injured and sought medical treatment. Variables of interest included police notification, ER treatment, and location type (i.e., rural, suburban, and urban). We used log-linear modeling with iterative proportional fitting to perform Goodness-of-Fit tests for independence of and interactions between the variables. In addition to discovering the rate at which police are notified of these serious violent victimizations in rural areas (74%) and the rate at which the rural victims of violence seek medical treatment in the ER (30%), we found (1) rates of both police notification and ER treatment are independent of location (i.e., they are similar in rural, suburban, and urban areas), (2) police notification and ER treatment are not independent of each other (i.e., they are correlated regardless of location type), and (3) three-way interactions between location type, police notification, and ER treatment.