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The crime victimization survey was discovered more than four decades ago. It allowed researchers to measure crime directly from the accounts of citizens themselves rather than filtered by the criminal justice system, as it had been measured before. Since then, victimization surveys have been set up all over the world. With a notable exception (the rotating panel design of the US National Crime Victimization Survey) they are all straightforward repeated annual surveys. Because of its cross-sectional design, the victimization survey tells us little about continuity and change in the victimization experiences of individuals over time. We only know that some individuals and some households suffer excessively from criminal victimization within a single year (eg Pease, 1998). Are patterns of victimization characterized by stability or change? Do chronic victims exist? Due to the focus on cross-sectional victimization data sources, we have very little knowledge about long-term individual patterns of victimization. We lose information by just looking at short periods of people’s lives. This dissertation makes a case for longitudinal research, or research where individuals are followed over longer periods of their life. Longitudinal research is important for at least two reasons.

First, longitudinal research on victimization allows us to study whether victimization is distributed unequally among individuals. Cross-sectional figures tell us that in 2008 in The Netherlands, 25% of citizens were victim of a crime. Five percent of citizens were victim of violence, twelve percent of property crimes, and twelve percent of vandalism1 (CBS, 2009). But however important such cross …