Using national incident-based reporting system (NIBRS) data to understand financial exploitation of the elderly: A research note

While there has been an increasing awareness among policy makers and the public about the potential risks of financial exploitation faced by the elderly, there have been few national assessments of this problem due largely to methodological challenges-such as underreporting, small and nonrepresentative samples, inconsistent offense definitions, and infrequent or unsystematic data collection. This paper illustrates the extent to which the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) data can address some of these methodological limitations in order to contribute to a baseline picture of the prevalence and characteristics of elderly financial exploitation in the United States.