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Data Collection Data Sources The Partnership continues to collect electronic data from the Indianapolis Police, Marion County Sheriff, Marion County Coroner, and from the two level-one trauma centers in Indianapolis as well as the other four Indianapolis area hospital emergency departments (EDs). A firearm injury is defined as a penetrating injury or gunshot wound from a weapon that uses a powder charge to fire a projectile. Medical records are obtained from six hospital emergency departments in the county, two of which represent the largest emergency departments and are the only level I trauma centers in the state of Indiana. To facilitate ED reporting, hospital staff choose a reporting method that best meets their needs including: Access® database, Excel® spreadsheet, comma delimited text file or a simple one-page form. The basic elements of data include: date of ED visit, patient’s race, gender, date of birth, disposition of victim (deceased, admitted, or released), and zip code of victim’s residence. Data collection is approved by the Institutional Review Boards for Indiana University – Purdue University at Indianapolis. The police data are obtained from the Indianapolis Police Department and Marion County Sheriff’s Department. The police database is searched for all incident reports containing the key words/phrases: person shot, gunshot, police action shooting or a combination of words from each of the following two sets of key words: firearm, gun, bullet, shooting, casing, or gunshot and wound, injury, injuries, homicide, or hospital. After the reports are selected, the following information is extracted from each case: incident date, victim’s name, gender, race, date of birth, residence address, location of incident, person involved, evidence and narrative. Supplementary Homicide Reports are also obtained and reviewed. The coroner’s data are obtained from the database of the Marion County Coroner’s Office. All cases involving firearm deaths are extracted from the database for review. The following information is extracted from each case: person’s name, gender, race, date of birth, residence address, incident date, and investigation report. Data Linking After gathering the data from all of the data sources, since many of the injuries are reported by more than one data source, a computer program based on Visual Basic is used to match data automatically according to date of birth and incident date. These matched data are used to create a unique record of consolidated information for each injury or death. When a match can not be made automatically, the software facilitates a manual matching process by presenting a list of possible match candidates. A skilled user then makes the final decision on a match using information such as race, gender, wound location on body, hospital attended, and zip code of residence. In some cases, the identifiable information of the person is requested from the ED in order to match data. This process ensures an unduplicated count of GSW victims. The matched records are assigned a common Victim ID. A similar manual process, with software assistance, is used to link multiple victims to a single incident and the linked victims are assigned a common Incident ID. Data Coding Information regarding incident place, disposition of victim, and circumstances surrounding the shooting is coded and categorized according to the Uniform Data Elements of the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS). The intent was categorized as unintentional, assault/homicide, intentional self-inflicted / suicide, legal intervention/war operation and undetermined according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendations. |
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