NIBRS and SHR: A Comparison of Two National Homicide Databases With Respect to Parricide

Abstract

ABSTRACTEmpirical studies on children killing parents in the United States have used the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) arrest database and have focused on single victim-single offender incidents. The authors used a second national database, National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), to compare the correlates of single victim-single offender parricide incidents in the United States from 1991 to 2010 across the two databases. NIBRS, unlike the SHR database, which includes homicide arrests across the United States, currently encompasses 30% of the U.S. population and 28% of the crime statistics collected by the FBI. Statistical tests to compare findings from the two data sets are conducted to determine to what extent NIBRS data yield similar profiles to SHR data. Results indicated that the offender, victim, and weapons data for parents and stepfathers were generally very consistent across the two databases. Very few statistically significant differences between the two data sets were observed. Study limitations and directions for future research are discussed.