Citation

Van Court J, Trent RB. Homicide Stud. 2004; 8(3): 311-321.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2004, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/1088767904265433

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The California Linked Homicide File links two major files containing information on homicides. The basic file includes 34,542 cases from Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR). Using a probabilistic matching program, 32,122 (93.0%) of these cases were linked with information from Vital Statistics (VS) death records. Why weren't the remaining 7% of cases linked? What makes these 2,420 records different from the cases that were linked? Analysis demonstrated that many of the unlinked cases involved child abuse and that many deaths appearing as child abuse in the SHR were not classified as assault deaths in the VS death records. By broadening the definition of what kinds of deaths in VS death records could be possible links with SHR reports, we were able to marginally improve the overall linkage rate (from 93.0% to 94.2%) and to increase the pool of linked child abuse deaths by 7.1%.