Attribute Approach

I. INTRODUCTION

The relationship between the victim and the offender is an important variable in studies of personal violence because it places the event within the context of social structures. Roles such as husband, wife, friend, lover, and stranger are complex social relationships which may delineate homicides that share a distinctive etiology. Furthermore, the moral and legal responses to violence are, to a large extent, determined by the social roles of the victim and offender. Although most studies of personal violence collect information on victim-offender relationships, the literature contains little conceptual guidance and almost no methodological research on the measurement issues. Researchers typically report results as though the distinctions between concepts such as "primary" and "secondary" or "stranger" and "non-stranger" are simple and self-evident.

In practice, however, the classifications are based on complex decisions made by coders working with police documents which frequently contain contradictory testimony and spotty information about victim-offender relationships.