ABSTRACT
Each interview began with questions designed to obtain identifying information, such as name, position, relationship to the elderly population of Focus Town and/or foundation for knowledge about crime and the elderly. Questions are open-ended in order to obtain the respondents’ unique perspectives”. This suggested procedure was followed with all informants, and therefore, the interviews were of varying lengths, depending upon the need for additional clarifying questions. The crimes of robbery, burglary, theft, drug involvement, weapon usage, assault, battery, murder, and rape constituted the group of specific crimes noted. A thematic content analysis of the transcriptions of each interview was conducted. The process of analyzing data from transcribed interviews is effectively presented by A. Omery. Frequency distributions of Index crimes in newspaper crime references were calculated to estimate the prevalence of Index crime references.
