Studying Repeat Victimization: A Consideration of Measurement Issues

Decades of research have recognized the phenomenon of repeat victimization and its policy relevance. Although there are continuing efforts to explain the theoretical underpinnings of repeat victimization, there are still measurement-related issues that limit our understanding of the topic and ability to inform interventions, including varying operational definitions, data constraints, and sampling and nonsampling error. In this article, we review theoretical advances in the literature over the past decade, propose operationalizations that can foster greater consistency across studies, comprehensively assess the data constraints around commonly used public data sources to study repeat victimization, and empirically demonstrate how one of these constraints—missing data—can be considered. Recommendations for future research in the area of repeat victimization are provided.