Evaluating the impact of Syrian refugees on fear of crime in Turkey

Abstract

The forced migration of individuals and groups in the world has increased substantially amid extensive regional and international conflicts. A prime example is the continuing civil war in Syria, during which Turkey has become the host country for more Syrian refugees than any other country in the region. Research on fear of crime has focused mainly on fear of crime in general rather than on fear of crime being committed by specific groups of individuals with a shared identity. The current study used survey data to investigate the extent to which the general crime fear among Turkish citizens differs from their fear that Syrian refugees in the country may commit a crime. Consistent with theoretical assumptions of subgroup threats, the overall results of the study show that Turkish citizens’ relational discomfort with Syrians, their perception that Syrian refugees pose a security threat, and their encounters with Syrian refugees in their neighborhoods are significantly associated with the manifestation of fear of general and group-specific crime. Fear of both types of crime was higher among females, which is consistent with previous research; however, contrary to previous research, young people rather than elderly people were more fearful of crime.

Sampling Twitter users for social science research: evidence from a systematic review of the literature

“…• Convenience sampling focuses on gaining information from Twitter users who are 'convenient' for the researcher to access. In the reviewed papers, convenience sampling was adopted in 6 studies, using one of the following approaches: (i) selection via researchers' followers (e.g., Akyuz et al 2021); (ii) selection via promoted or ad tweets (e.g., Montgomery et al 2018); and (iii) selection of students on campus (e.g., Mohammed and Ferraris 2021). • Snowball sampling this method is a kind of convenience sampling in which, after agreeing to cooperate, the Twitter users initially selected for the study are solicited to retweet the invitation to the study to their followers.…”

“…In 7 studies researchers acknowledge that the sampling methods restrict or compromise the possibility of generalizing the outcomes beyond the scope of the study (Chen 2011;Fischer and Reuber 2011;Hswen et al 2018b;Majmundar et al 2018Majmundar et al , 2019Sasaki et al 2015;Watson 2016). Two studies suggest that random sampling would be the gold standard of sampling in their research (Akyuz et al 2021;Sashittal and Jassawalla 2019). Table 9 presents citations that illustrate the explanations found about this issue.…”

“…Sample selection is noted as a major problem in 19 studies, but no details are provided about the magnitude of the impact on the findings of using specific sampling methods. The development and implementation of strategies to deal with these issues, such as adopting random sampling instead of non-random sampling (e.g., Pentina et al 2013;Kobayashi et al 2019;Akyuz et al 2021) or sample weighting (Kobayashi et al 2019), are postponed to future research.…”