The New Zealand Crime and Victims Survey has reached its target of interviewing 8,000 New Zealanders aged over 15 about their experience of crime.

The Ministry of Justice says its survey, which began in March 2018, is believed to be New Zealand's biggest crime survey.

Project director James Swindells says there was an excellent response rate of 80%.

“There is currently very little recent information on the amount of crime and the number of victims in New Zealand,” Mr Swindells says. “It is something of an information black hole for the justice sector as we know only about 30% of crime is reported to the police.”

Mr Swindells says the New Zealand Crime and Victims Survey will provide very valuable information and data for the Ministry of Justice, Stats NZ, Ministry of Social Development, Te Puni Kokiri, the Police, Department of Corrections, Oranga Tamariki, and the Ministry for Women.

“It will also be of great interest to the Universities and NGOs working in the justice sector,” he says. “We expect to have the top-line results published by the end of the year with a full report published in the first quarter of next year.

“We are planning for a series of follow-up reports on specific topics, for example, a theme of this survey has been family violence and we will produce a specific paper on this. We also intend to make confidentialised data available for researchers to do their own analysis.”

Mr Swindells says the New Zealand Crime and Victim Surveyu replaces the previous New Zealand Crime and Safety Survey which often took years to publish the results. He says the replacement survey has an improved methodology.

A random sample of New Zealanders was chosen to provide a complete picture of the population allowing for age, geographic distribution and social economic situation. The survey has a weighting towards Māori who make up 29 percent of interviews. Each respondent was visited by an interviewer for about half an hour. The information people provided for NZCVS is entirely confidential.