Loftin C
Institute of Criminal Justice and Criminology, University of Maryland.
Violence Vict. 1986 Fall;1(3):191-204.
The most widely used source of nationwide data on homicide in the United States is the Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) data compiled by the FBI as part of its Uniform Crime Reporting System. This paper describes a study of the reliability of robbery-murder classifications by the SHR for Baltimore, Maryland during 1983. The research is exploratory, but indicates a high level of inconsistency in the data. Of the 42 cases that were classified as robbery murders by the SHR or the replication study, only 20 were classified that way in both studies. The high level of unreliability can be attributed to three major problems: (1) the SHR codes are mutually exclusive, but many homicides could be placed in several of the categories; (2) there are few systematic rules for classifying ambiguously motivated homicides; and (3) the SHR placed too many cases in the "unknown" category. It appears that the reliability of the coding could be increased substantially with relatively minor changes in the procedures currently used.
美国全国范围内关于杀人案件最广泛使用的数据来源是联邦调查局（FBI）作为其统一犯罪报告系统的一部分汇编的补充杀人报告（SHR）数据。本文描述了一项对1983年马里兰州巴尔的摩市SHR抢劫杀人分类可靠性的研究。该研究具有探索性，但表明数据存在高度不一致性。在被SHR或重复研究归类为抢劫杀人的42起案件中，两项研究都如此归类的只有20起。高度不可靠可归因于三个主要问题：（1）SHR编码相互排斥，但许多杀人案件可归入多个类别；（2）对于动机不明的杀人案件，几乎没有系统的分类规则；（3）SHR将太多案件归入“未知”类别。看来，通过对当前使用的程序进行相对较小的更改，编码的可靠性可以大幅提高。
