METHODOLOGY

The survey was conducted through Survey Monkey, with the link distributed primarily through the IAHSS and IAHSS Foundation contact lists, the IAHSS website, and personal outreach by IAHSS Foundation board members.

The received data were vetted by the IAHSS Foundation Board of Directors. Multiple responses were discarded for reasons including, but not necessarily limited to, missing bed counts, outlier data that could not be confirmed, and responses coming from clinics rather than inpatient hospital facilities.

All submissions are kept confidential, and only aggregate data is reported.

LIMITATIONS

There were several limitations associated with the 2022 Crime Survey, including, but not necessarily limited to, the following:

  • The 263 responses leave about 97 percent of hospitals in the United States unaccounted for. Respondents were a self-selected group, and it is possible that sampling bias resulted in this group not being a representative sample of the nation’s hospitals.
  • Outreach targeted IAHSS members, so hospitals with no association members on staff are unlikely to have been included.
  • In several instances, judgment calls had to be made regarding what constituted illegitimate, outlier data, raising the possibility of both Type 1 and Type 2 errors. Rejected responses included, but were not limited to, one reporting 20 murders at a 435- bed facility. Not all responses were dismissed because of high numbers, though. Several hospitals reported having more than 2,000 disorderly conducts incidents during the year, with one exceeding 4,000, and these responses were retained. (See below.) Outliers at the opposite extreme, such as a 504-bed facility that reported no criminal incidents of any kind (but did note four elopements) were also included.
  • Some responses were non-specific. For example, “<10” Other Assaults. In these cases, the number was used as if it was exact. Even in responses without such qualifiers, rounding and/or estimation cannot be ruled out. Where a range was given (e.g., “7-8 employees” for the security staffing question), the midpoint was used in calculations.
  • Since responses were for individual hospitals, some hospital systems may have been represented multiple times.
  • The use of bed counts may not be the best indicator of hospital size and population. For example, number of Emergency Department visits, number of employees, hospital square footage, average daily census, and adjusted patient days can also be used to calculate crime rates. Bed counts, however, were the most consistently reported indicator of size and/or population and allow for continuity with Crime Surveys from previous years.
  • Data may have been mis-entered by respondents.
  • Notwithstanding the inclusion of UCR definitions in the survey, respondents may have compiled data using different definitions of crimes. There may also be variation in the definitions used for “elopement” and other terms. For example, one respondent answered the elopements question with “19 attempted, 2 actual.” Others might have combined “attempted” elopements and actual ones without noting it as was done here.
  • With 263 responses, a small number of hospitals reporting a large number of incidents could significantly affect the overall rates of certain crimes. For example, six responses accounted for 37 percent of all disorderly conducts reported, while two facilities accounted for 12 percent of all violent crime incidents.