Is it possible to measure a variable using more than one level of measurement? How? When would that not work?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Government reports are rich and readily accessible sources of criminal justice data, as are datasets available from nonprofit advocacy groups, university researchers, and some private businesses. For example, law enforcement and health statistics provide several community-level indicators of substance abuse (Gruenewald, Treno, Taff, & Klitzner, 1997). Statistics on arrests for the sale and possession of drugs, drunk driving arrests, and liquor law violations (such as sales to minors) can usually be obtained on an annual basis, and often quarterly, from local police departments or state crime information centers.
Still, indicators such as these cannot be compared across communities or over time without reviewing carefully how they were constructed in each community (Gruenewald et al., 1997). We also cannot assume that available data are accurate, even when they appear to measure the concept in which we are interested in a way that is consistent across communities.
Government statistics that are generated through a central agency such as the U.S. Census Bureau are usually of high quality, but caution is still warranted when using official data. Data accuracy is more of an issue for data collected by local levels of government. For example, the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) program administered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) imposes standard classification criteria, with explicit guidelines and regular training at the local level, but data are still inconsistent for many crimes. Different jurisdictions vary in their definition of terms such as “more than necessary force” and even in the classification of offenses as aggravated or simple assaults (Mosher, Miethe, & Phillips, 2002). The new National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), mentioned in Chapter 1, corrects some of the problems with the UCR, but it requires much more training and documentation and has not yet been adopted by all jurisdictions (Mosher et al., 2002).