QUESTIONING THE MEASUREMENT OF THE 'FEAR OF CRIME': Findings from a Major Methodological Study

Public Confidence in Policing

“…The psychological edge was seen in vulnerability and subjective threat appraisal explaining why some people worried about personal crime, while others did not. 2 The 1 Recent research has raised the possibility that standard research tools actually exaggerate the fear of crime problem, in the sense that worry about crime may be less frequent than commonly thought (Farrall et al 1997;Farrall & Gadd, 2004;see Farrall, 2004 andHough, 2004a). Moreover, some people's responses to risk may be better characterised as functional fear so arguably does not constitute a social problem (Jackson, 2006a) -respondents report being worried about crime, but careful probing reveals that worry for them is more of a problem-solving activity than something that eats into their well-being -a risk management strategy or natural defense against crime.…”

Validating New Measures of the Fear of Crime

“…It emphasises the value of a strong theoretical basis in developing concepts and measures: how the building blocks of research gain from a solid intellectual foundation. And it is intriguing to learn that theoretical under-specification and rather technical issues of survey question wording may have had an deleterious impact on the knowledge base on what has become a high-profile public policy issue of our time.For many years doubts have been raised about the validity and reliability of measures of the fear of crime (see, for example: Bernard, 1992;Bowling, 1993;Fattah, 1993;Skogan, 1981;Farrall et al, 1997;and Zauberman, 1985). This paper also discusses the advantages of defining (and measuring) social phenomena in a broad and inclusive manner.…”

Civilised Communities

“…To compare the two groups' attitudes, perceptions and experiences, a bilingual survey was designed, translated and administered to 'local' and 'migrant' populations throughout the selected neighbourhoods in Crewe via a 'random walk' sampling design, whereby every 5 th household was selected to partake in the survey (see Farrall et al, 1997 for a description). It was originally planned to obtain a random, but not proportionate, equal sample of respondents from the Polish community and from the local community.…”