The Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire: Reliability, validity, and national norms☆
Introduction
The Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire (JVQ) was developed as a comprehensive, developmental approach to assess crime, child maltreatment, and other kinds of victimization experiences during childhood. It attempts to fill a need created by a burgeoning clinical and research interest in the epidemiology and impact of these experiences.
The JVQ was designed to meet certain needs that have not been fully met by other available instruments (Hamby & Finkelhor, 2000). Among them are the following.
A broad range of childhood victimizations have captured clinical and research attention, but few existing instruments cover the full spectrum to include child maltreatment, crime victimization, and sexual assault, as well as other topics such as bullying and the witnessing of violence. Researchers and clinicians can come to erroneous conclusions about the importance and impact of some victimizations if they are not aware of a child's complete victimization profile (Finkelhor, Ormrod, Turner, & Hamby, 2005).
Most kinds of victimization occur in some form across the span of childhood. Being able to obtain developmental trajectories and to assess children of various ages is an important value for an instrument in this field. Many other instruments are limited to certain age groups such as adolescents or elementary school-age children (Fox & Leavitt, 1995; for review see Hamby & Finkelhor, 2001a; Kilpatrick, Acierno, Saunders, Resnick, Best, & Schnurr, 2000; Kochenderfer & Ladd, 1996; Richters, Martinez, & Valla, 1990; Singer, Anglin, Song, & Lunghofer, 1995).
The agencies that deal with child victimization have specific categories into which they must classify victimizations for purposes of investigation and intervention. Police utilize categories such as aggravated assault. The child protective system utilizes a related but not identical category of physical abuse, which means physical assaults and inflicted injuries by caregivers. Many existing instruments have constructs that do not map easily onto these official categories.
Section snippets
General description
The JVQ contains screening questions about 34 offenses against youth that cover five general areas of concern: (1) Conventional Crime, (2) Child Maltreatment, (3) Peer and Sibling Victimization, (4) Sexual Victimization, and (5) Witnessing and Indirect Victimization (see Appendix A). Each of these five areas is a module of the JVQ. Although comprehensiveness is an important goal of the JVQ, these modules have been developed to take into account important conceptual categories that characterize
Participants
This research is based on data from the Developmental Victimization Survey (DVS). The survey, conducted between December, 2002 and February, 2003, assessed the experiences of a nationally representative sample of 2,030 children ages 2–17 living in the contiguous United States. The interviews with parents and youth were conducted over the phone by the employees of an experienced survey research firm specially trained to talk with children and parents. Telephone interviewing is a cost-effective
Patterns of endorsement
Large numbers of JVQ screeners were endorsed by the study respondents. The sample of 2,030 endorsed a total of 5,326 victimization screeners concerning experiences in the last year or an average of 2.63 endorsements per respondent; 71% of the respondents endorsed at least one item. The maximum number of endorsements was 20. The most frequently endorsed item (45%) was about being hit by a peer or sibling in the last year (Table 1). The items concerning emotional bullying, witnessing assault
Discussion
The performance of the JVQ in a national telephone survey suggests its potential utility as an instrument for measuring victimizations in epidemiological and research studies. It fulfilled the expectations of its developers and elicited information about large numbers of episodes across a range of victimization domains and across a wide spectrum of developmental stages. There were few indicators of respondent resistance or confusion. In a test of construct validity, endorsements of JVQ items,
Conclusion
The use of measures that assess only one or a few forms of victimization has impeded the ability to answer some key questions about youth victimization. These include identifying the extent to which children are multiply-victimized and comparing the relative effects of different forms of victimization. The JVQ offers a comprehensive measure of youth victimization that also uses definitions of victimization that closely correspond to police and child protection categories of crime and
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Kelly Foster for her help in the manuscript preparation, John Boyle and Patricia Vanderwolf for help in data collection, Kathy Becker-Blease for help with the questionnaire design and human subjects, and members of the Family Violence Research Seminar for helpful comments on the manuscript.
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For the purposes of compliance with Section 507 of PL 104–208 (the “Stevens Amendment”), readers are advised that 100% of the funds for this program are derived from federal sources (US Department of Justice). The total amount of federal funding involved is $353,233.