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Local Areas and Fear of Criminal Victimisation: Applying Multilevel Models to the British Crime Survey
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Brunton-Smith, Ian |
| Copyright Year | 2008 |
| Abstract | Fear of crime is now a central area of criminological debate and a key element of Government crime policy. Yet despite some 40 years of sustained enquiry a number of questions around the fear of crime still remain. One such question is the impact that local neighbourhood context plays in the formation of individual fears, and how these environmental influences relate to the differences in fear that have regularly been observed between different population groups. This thesis draws together the dominant individual and ecological explanations that have been put forward to explain variations in fear of crime into an integrated multilevel framework, providing a robust empirical test of the contention that neighbourhoods matter. Linking information from the UK census directly to three years of British Crime Survey data, this thesis demonstrates empirical support for the impact of the neighbourhood level of social disorganisation on fear of crime, an effect which is shown to be felt more acutely by vulnerable groups in society. This also identifies an important link between individual ethnicity and the neighbourhood level of ethnic diversity, with Black residents being less fearful in neighbourhoods characterised by higher diversity, whilst White people report higher fear in these neighbourhoods. Using a measure of the local crime rate collected at a considerably smaller spatial scale than previous studies, it also identifies a direct link between the crime profile of the local area and levels of fear. Moreover, this relationship is found to be directly linked to the personal crime histories of residents, with recent victims of crime more aware of the local crime problem than non-victims. Finally, this thesis introduces the competing influence of interviewers to provide us with further information about the contextual influences on fear. Interviewer variability has no direct effect on the neighbourhood effects previously identified, but shows us that the bulk of the remaining contextual influence is better attributed to differences between interviewers. Further to this, the study shows that older and more experienced interviewers generally elicit lower levels of fear from respondents. There is also an important link between individual and interviewer ethnicity, with Asian and Black respondents interviewed by someone from the same ethnicity reporting significantly lower levels of fear, reversing the traditional image of ethnic minorities as more fearful in society. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/1026/1/fulltext.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
