Filtering Fear? On the Use of Filter and Frequency Questions in Crime Surveys. Jonathan Jackson, Stephen Farrall, & David Gadd.

Transcription

1 Filtering Fear? On the Use of Filter and Frequency Questions in Crime Surveys Jonathan Jackson, Stephen Farrall, & David Gadd. Coming out in a Special Edition of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology on European Criminology to be Edited by Susanne Karstedt, Tim Hope and Alan Trickett. This research was kindly supported by: the Economic and Social Research Council, grant number RES ; and, the Home Office as part of the Economic Evaluation of Targeted Policing Projects. We would like to express our gratitude to these bodies. We would like to express our gratitude to the Editors of this Special Edition whose comments undoubtedly improved the clarity of the arguments contained herein. Flaws and weaknesses in the argument remain our own, however. Please address correspondence to: Dr Jonathan Jackson, Methodology Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom, or to j.p.jackson@lse.ac.uk.

2 Abstract Research exploring emotional responses to crime in European and North American countries has suggested that a significant proportion of western populations live in fear of crime. The last decade has seen increasing scepticism over what this actually means. Yet there remains a lack of careful methodological work to establish what questions around the fear of crime are measuring, and how we can improve on the measurement of this topic. This contribution finds that, in the UK, questions that focus on the frequency of fear produce lower rates of fear than standard questions on the intensity of fear. We also find, in a survey experiment, that a frequency filter question reduces reported levels of the intensity of fear. That is, asking respondents whether they have recently felt fearful before presenting standard measures actually reduces prevalence rates. We discuss a number of possible explanations for these findings. Key words: fear of crime; survey measurement; crime surveys; emotional responses to crime. 2

3 1: Introduction Uncertainty about how best to define the fear of crime has been around for as long as this field of enquiry. Beginning with DuBow et al.'s (1979) less than glowing assessment of the clarity and consistency of survey measurement tools, readers of the criminological literature will have regularly encountered commentary from respected scholars on the importance, and slowness, of progress in this regard (see, for example: Garofalo, 1979; Ferraro and LaGrange, 1987; van der Wurff et al., 1989; Bernard, 1992; Fattah, 1993; Skogan, 1993; Warr, 1994; Hale, 1996; Farrall et al., 1997; Greve, 1998; Girling et al. 2000). Given such long-held concerns, one might be surprised to learn that few studies have actually examined the seriousness of the potential problems. The lack of empirical work to investigate what crime surveys are measuring may have serious implications for the criminological literature and for public policy that relies on this body of knowledge. The results of largescale surveys have contributed to the fear of crime becoming an established social fact, yet the possibility remains that fear is as much a methodological artefact as an empirical reality (Lee, 1999, 2001; Farrall et al. 1997). This article contributes to the small quantity of empirical work regarding the survey measurement of the fear of crime. How should we interpret the response of a respondent who answers, for example, that he or she is very worried about crime, or feels unsafe walking in their neighbourhood after dark? We have little data on how everyday experience translates into these self-reports the psychological nature of the emotion, the frequency with which this occurs, and the overall effect on behaviour and quality of life. What data are available combine with conjecture from scholars to suggest that imperfect measurement tools exaggerate the prevalence of the fear of crime (see, for example: Fattah, 1993: 53-54; Yin, 1982: 242; Bernard, 1992: 66; Farrall et al, 1997: ; and Schuman and Presser, 1996: 85). In this paper we analyse the history of fear of crime measures and report the results of two studies. The first study tests a new set of measures designed to avoid some shortcomings of standard indicators. Old and new measures are fielded in a nationally representative omnibus survey of England and Wales, and the respective prevalence rates (using old and new indicators) are compared. The second study uses experimental techniques to manipulate question wording, this time in a smaller-scale survey. The paper finishes by discussing a number of explanations for the findings. 2: Measuring the Fear of Crime Early beginnings Public concerns about dangerous localities and people, about the social and moral order of society, and the pace and direction of social change, have long historical roots (Curtis, 2001; Pearson, 1983; Shaw, 1931). Analysing newspaper reporting of the famous Jack the Ripper murders in late 19 th -Century London, Curtis (2001) describes how the mass media heightened pre-existing public alarm about crime, examining how the murders were linked to debates regarding the inability of the police to protect the public and the growth of a semi-criminal social underclass. This dramatic case reflected (and refracted) a public already fascinated by sensational crime. For Curtis the case typified how such events are embedded in a matrix of moral and political imperatives about law and order (ibid.: 15). But the contemporary manifestation of the fear of crime as an object of study and a category of description began with the President s Crime Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice (1967) in the US. Let us turn to the reports of three crime surveys commissioned by this body (Biderman et al., 1967; Ennis, 1967; Reiss, 1967), themselves pre-empted by a survey of 10,000 households by the National Opinion Research Centre 3

4 (NORC) in In tandem with surveys undertaken by the Bureau of Social Science Research in Washington and by the Survey Research Centre of the University of Michigan in several other cities, these studies principally sought to count unrecorded victimisation, partly leading to the emergence of National Crime Surveys conducted regularly by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (Zedner, 1997). But a belief that the public was anxious about crime also motivated the organisation of the Commission itself. 1 For the first time, the three funded surveys included questions about public attitudes towards crime and perceptions of their own safety. The report of the first survey (of the Washington DC area, Biderman et al., 1967) refers to anxiety about crime and it is instructive to consider one of the first operational definitions of fear. A chapter entitled fear of crime reports the combination of the following five rather idiosyncratic questions (which are worth reading closely) to create an index of anxiety (ibid., p. 121): What was it about the neighbourhood that was most important? [Response alternatives: Safety or moral characteristics ; and Convenience or aesthetic characteristics ] ; When you think about the chances of getting beaten up would you say this neighborhood is [Response alternatives: Very safe ; About average ; Less safe than most ; One of the worst ; and Don t know ] ; Is there so much trouble that you would move if you could? (For those who did not characterize neighborhood as very safe.) [Response alternatives: Yes ; and No ] ; Are most of your neighbors quiet or are there some who create disturbances? [Response alternatives: All quiet ; Few disturbances ; and Many disturbances ] ; and Do you think that crime has been getting better or worse here in Washington during the past year? [Response alternatives: Better ; Worse ; and Same ] Another of these pilot studies commissioned by the President s Commission fielded a different set of measures. Among the items were: How safe do you feel walking alone in your neighborhood after dark? ; Have you wanted to go somewhere recently but stayed home because it was unsafe? ; How concerned are you about having your home broken into? ; and, How likely is it a person walking around here at night be held up or attacked? (Ennis, 1967). While the questions of Biderman et al. (1967) and Ennis (1967) lacked theoretical specification comprising a somewhat uneven and unstructured collection of indicators they had the advantage of conceptualising public attitudes in a multi-dimensional manner. And as the vexed question of whether fears are rational or not gathered currency leading to some stale and unproductive debates the concluding and often overlooked chapter of Biderman et al. s report made a fascinating attempt to contextualise public anxieties by discussing the inherently symbolic nature of crime: The special significance of crime is at the social level. The intensity of public reaction to it is understandable in that it reveals weaknesses of the moral order on which not only everyone s safety depends but also almost everything else 1 Readers are directed towards Harris (1969) account of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, 1968, and its passage through the US Congressional process. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, riots flared up in twenty inner-city ghettos in the mid-1960s, the issue of civil rights boiled over in numerous arenas; disorder and unrest had become national anxieties. Race was a hot topic. Stanko (2000) describes how the McCone Commission (1966, but quoted in the President s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, 1967) examined the cause of unrest in U.S. cities, concluding that the structural conditions of poverty and disadvantage in many predominantly Black areas were leading to anger, hostility and resentment. The President s Commission report clearly located White anxieties about crime within this context of racial tension and unrest (Ditton and Farrall, 2000). 4

5 that is important and precious in life. Crimes therefore have significance in proportion to the extent to which they affront the moral sensibilities of persons... Perceptions of changes in the prevalence of crime can be expected to evoke particularly intense public reactions in that these can be taken as signs of threats to the fundamental moral order. This clearly is the case with much of the current public reaction to news of increasing crime. (1967, p. 164) The first systematic attempt to distinguish between aspects of anxieties about crime (Furstenberg, 1971) differentiated between concern about crime (measured by eliciting estimates of the relative seriousness of crime nationally by asking respondents to select the single most serious problem that they would like to see the government do something about ) and the fear of crime (measured by self-reported estimates of the chance of becoming a victim). Fear and concern were empirically unrelated. Concern was weakly and negatively associated with crime rates at a neighbourhood level, and fear was more strongly and positively related to local crime rates. Furstenberg also found that concern was related to resentment of changing social conditions, especially efforts to eliminate racial injustice (ibid., p. 606). Over time, variants of questions about perceptions of safety out on the street became standard. Yet these measures also attracted the most critical comment. Garofalo and Laub (1978) pointed out that safety questions did not mention crime, failed to provide a specific frame of geographical reference, and specified a situation that may be hypothetical to many of us. Garofalo and Laub (ibid.) argued that these measures tap into things above and beyond the fear of actually becoming a victim of crime. They reflected a broader issue; that crime is tied up with symbolic issues, tied up with a disrupted sense of community. Concern for community included: the fear of actual criminal acts as well as the feeling that one s social situation is unstable, anxiety about strangers, the belief that one s moral beliefs are being offended, and so forth. (p. 250). The Figgie Report (Figgie, 1980) continued the theme. Formless fear was measured by perceptions of safety and relating to rather abstract threats to one s security, they argued; in contrast, concrete fear by indicated by self-reported concern about becoming a victim of various personal crimes. Asking specifically about crime Not unsurprisingly then, the 1970s saw criminologists arguing that there is something more to fear of crime than simply fear of crime (e.g. Garofalo and Laub, 1978; Hunter, 1978; Wilson, 1976). Evidence began to accrue that people assess the threat of victimisation partly through the interpretation of symbols of crime in their immediate surroundings what Biderman et al. (ibid., p. 160) referred to as highly visible signs of what [people] regard as disorderly and disreputable behaviour in their community. From one perspective then, perceived safety questions were on the right track, downplaying crime in the question wording: the urban unease created by incivil conditions causes people to feel uneasy and unsafe, and the threat of crime seems part but not all of what is going on here (for defences of these measures see: Maxfield, 1984; Skogan and Maxfield, 1981). Yet the lack of precision in perceived safety questions concerned some scholars. One issue was the psychological underpinning of the conceptualisation. In an influential article, Ferraro and LaGrange (1987) argued that the perceived safety question measures judgements of risk, albeit in a vague and diffuse manner, rather than an emotional reaction. This is not hairsplitting: these measures conflate measures of fear with measures of judgements of threat; indicators of emotion and perceptions of risk are related but not strongly enough to indicate that the constructs being measured are the same (Lee, 1982; Warr and Stafford, 1983; Warr, 1984). But more than this, different measures of fear yield inconsistent empirical relationships. Perceived safety measures elicit different predictors than indicators of worry, perceived risk 5

6 and fear. For example, take the much-repeated statement that the elderly are more afraid of crime than the young. This was borne out by research that uses the perceived safety question: the elderly tend to feel less safe walking alone after dark than other age groups. However, if you ask people how worried or afraid they are of becoming a victim of a number of different crimes, the age effect generally disappears (see inter alia Hough and Mayhew, 1985; LaGrange and Ferraro, 1989; and in particular Chadee and Ditton, 2003). For Ferraro and LaGrange (1987, p. 82): Researchers proclivity to term various types of perceptions about crime as the fear of crime has all too frequently resulted in misspecification of models and/or a confounded variable problem. Ferraro and LaGrange (1987, p. 715) concluded that:... fear of crime measurement procedures greatly shape fear of crime findings... [the perceived safety question] probably overestimate[s] the true level of fear because of the foreboding scenario presented in the questions and their lack of relevance to the everyday life of most persons... especially to older persons who are least likely to travel alone on the streets at night. They recommended that measures have the following characteristics: (1) use how afraid a helpful way to examine an emotional state of fear ; (2) make reference to crime do not use implied meaning as they are probably not valid indicators; (3) use specific crimes; (4) do not use a hypothetical format; (5) state in your everyday life to bring a touch of reality to the questions. In later work, Ferraro (1995) nicely demonstrated the utility of differentiating between perceived risk and fear. Applying symbolic interactionism theory, he found that ecological information such as perceptions of incivilities and problems of poverty, and socially shared information about the reputation of an area shapes the perceived risk of crime. Perceived risk then shapes fear and behavioural responses to a subjective sense of threat. Measuring emotions Happily for the British Crime Survey, all sweeps have included measures of worry about falling victim of various crimes and perceptions of the likelihood of this occurring, in addition to fielding perceived safety questions. And maybe as a response to gathering criticisms of perceived safety measures over time, attention has increasingly focused on worry and risk perception estimates. Reflecting a more sophisticated approach to measuring emotion, a relatively recent Home Office report argued that the fear of crime was a strange moniker in the British context because fear must occur much less frequently than anxiety or worry (Hough, 1995). Distinguishing between anxiety, perceptions of risk and disinterested concern (e.g. the seriousness of crime as an issue in society), this report marked a movement to use the terms individually and specifically, at the same time stressing anxiety and worry are perhaps better descriptors than fear in the UK. And for those who worry about naïve empiricism, there was also a healthy pragmatism about methodology in this report. Hough (ibid., p. 3) argues that surveys:... are undeniably blunt instruments for assessing people s anxieties about crime. Worry can range from mild fretting to stomach-churning anxiety. Inevitably people use different language to describe similar levels of worry, and the same terms to refer to very different levels of worry: some people are given to exaggeration, others to understatement. One might thus think that we have reached a satisfactory point in quantitative fear of crime research. Early measures and conceptual schemes have received considerable criticism; they 6

7 have been largely replaced by more advanced tools. At the same time, researchers are aware that measuring emotions is a difficult task; surveys may always offer partial representations of public feelings. Exaggerating the fear of crime problem? Yet we may not be out of the woods just yet. Even our best measures may have serious limitations. Farrall et al. (1997) tested the reliability of standard survey tools. One month (on average) after completing a survey, 64 respondents were asked the same questions again, this time in an open-ended interview. Defined as instances where an individual gave different answers depending upon the nature of the interview being undertaken, mismatches were noted, analysed and categorised. The findings revealed an alarming rate of inconsistencies. Only 15 out of 64 sets of interviews did not produce mismatches. A significant number (where answers differed to a moderate to strong degree) were related to the nature of the methodology e.g. 46 out of a total of 114 were mismatches between open and closed questions. Standard measures ask for an overall summary of the intensity of worry or perceived safety. Criticising them for not capturing the range and fluidity of meanings of fear is to display a certain naivety; the crucial question is whether respondents are providing useful summaries. Farrall et al (1997) found that, in the majority of mismatches, survey measures actually exaggerated levels of worry or fear. Open-ended discussion allowed individuals to voice what they were thinking and feeling. Strikingly, fear was not the most dominant response: respondents often expressed greater levels of anger about the prospect of criminal victimisation than fear (see Ditton et al., 1999). They also used descriptors such as distress, shock and thinking about crime instead of worry. Echoing the finding that one can substitute concern, worry and fear in fear of crime measures with little substantive effect (Jackson, 2004a), perhaps respondents who are fairly concerned about the risk of crime reply they are fairly worried, using worry as a shorthand. Importantly, this gives a slightly misleading impression about the intensity of emotion being felt. Just as importantly, when people talked about their worries, they thought back to examples, to situations. A great deal of variation between open and closed questions came to the fore in descriptions of how certain emotions manifested in their lives. In comparison to the openended questions, the closed-ended questions trampled on context and detail. For example, one individual who responded he was fairly worried about being robbed or assaulted said in the qualitative follow-up:.. it s when I go out at night and see a group of people, that s when it starts coming in to your head, but if you re walking around during the day you don t think about it really at all, or when you re sitting at home you don t think Oh, if I go out tonight, what ll happen? (Farrall et al., p. 665). It is difficult to square these self-reports. On the one hand you have someone who is fairly worried about being robbed or assaulted; on the other hand someone who thinks about the risk only if they re out and encounter certain type of people, not cognizant of the possibility when looking ahead to going out. The closed-ended question seemed to trample on the context of the situation the very context was important to understanding this person s feelings. Another example was an individual who placed himself as a 3 on a five-point worry about robbery scale, but who elaborated that since he was robbed he has been very careful so does not worry anymore. This exemplified the tramping of the context of time. Farrall et al. s (1997) study suggested that standard closed-ended measures treated fear as a stable property, taking a decontextualised snapshot (Bowling, 1993). Giving people the opportunity to elaborate, in the open-ended interviews, revealed fear to be a variable and shifting phenomenon, transitory and situational, ranging from an awareness of risk all the way 7

8 through to sharp and physical environmental responses. Interviewees could place worry, anxiety and the awareness of risk in the context in which it occurs, encouraging careful introspection about emotions, cognitions and behaviours in their context. By closing down such context and detail, measures of intensity of fear served to overstate or exaggerate the emotional responses to crime. Why might standard measures exaggerate the fear of crime? First, standard questions self-evidently impose the word worry or fear ; perhaps those people who have just a diffuse sense of risk or generalised concern about law and order simply cannot express this in any other way (Fattah, 1993). Second, the question wording may be slightly leading: how worried... or how afraid... present an operating premise that they are worried or afraid (Farrall & Ditton, 1999; see Moser & Kalton, 1971, p.325 for a general discussion of the problems inherent with how questions). Third, Lee (2001, p. 108) wryly observes when regaling a rather idiosyncratic survey conducted for an Australian newspaper: respondents replied that they were scared of getting stabbed... The question must be asked who would not be scared of getting stabbed. Closed-ended questions sensitise and direct responses to the set answers offered and it is difficult to construct items that do not lead respondents. Indeed the very carrying out of crime surveys may serve to increase sensitivity to the risk of crime (Zedner, 1997; Farrall, 2003). Fourth, intensity measures may be peculiarly sensitive to the idea that people simply are not good summarisers of their past experiences. 2 The anchoring and adjustment heuristic, originating from the judgement and decision-making literature, predicts that we develop beliefs by starting from a particular reference or anchor, and adjust these beliefs rather reluctantly according to available information (Kahneman et al. 1982). When we are asked, in a survey situation, how worried we are about becoming a victim of crime, perhaps we think back to the most available or easily retrieved event of worry, the most vivid and emotional instance. An episode of strong worry is likely to be retrieved more rapidly than an episode of mild concern. Having started from this initial reference point, the stronger but less frequent experience may become, as it were, a false representative of the everyday. Fifth, and going back to the work of Farrall et al. (1997), asking for an overall intensity summary may strip fear from its everyday context. Some people respond not by focusing on how worry ebbs and flows in their daily routine, but by offering a generalised attitude to the risk of crime. 3 By stripping worry out of its everyday context (emotional responses to crime being largely a transient and situational phenomenon), intensity measures may tap into a more abstract affective evaluation of perceived threat. Thus we could find people who manage their risk, avoiding situations where they actually feel worried, but who still report a sense of anxiety about falling victim. Extending this argument, perhaps people use the language of worry and crime to articulate a wealth of other and related concerns (see inter alia Girling et al., 2000; Hollway & Jefferson, 1997; Taylor et al. 1996; Hall et al. 1978, Garland, 2001; for a historical view see Pearson, 1983). As Biderman et al. (1967) speculated: Perceptions of changes in the prevalence of crime can be expected to evoke particularly intense public reactions in that 2 Indeed, recent evidence suggests that there may be systematic distortions in people s self-reported levels of anxiety such that men would appear to suppress their fear levels in surveys (Sutton and Farrall, 2005). 3 An attitude is largely understood by social psychologists to be an evaluation of a particular object in this case the possibility of becoming a victim of crime. One can have affective attitudes, so one can have feel bad or anxious about the possibility. One can have cognitive attitudes, so one could feel the probability is high, one does not have control over its incidence, and its consequences would be severe. And one can have behavioural attitudes, so one avoids certain areas because of perceived threat. What we are suggesting here is that affective generalised attitudes may, in some cases, operate independently to actual experience of worry or fear: thinking about one s own risk of crime may engender some level of emotion without one having been in specifically worrying situations of perceived threat recently. 8

9 these can be taken as signs of threats to the fundamental moral order. A number of qualitative studies have found that crime opens up a wealth of interpretations of the social world, embodying a perceived breakdown of social order, animating public conceptions of order and the moral trajectory of society and community (e.g. Girling et al., 2000). Attitudes toward crime may thus express complex and subtle lay understandings of the social world broader social values and attitudes about the nature and make-up of society and community and the value placed on crime in its symbol of deterioration (Jackson, 2004b). By expressing worry about crime, people might buy into common discourses in society, expressing their concerns with what they see as deteriorating social climates of values, morals and norms (Lee, 1998, 1999, 2001) as well as their own values and sense of what the moral and social order should be (Jackson, 2004b; Jackson, 2004c). Thus we come full-circle, to Biderman et al. (1967) and the importance of the symbolic nature of crime for individuals and societies. 3: The present research But, perhaps in our enthusiasm, we have got a little ahead of ourselves. Let us think more technically about fear of crime questions. One potential problem of standard measures is their intensity nature. On the one hand, asking people how worried..., or how afraid..., or how safe do you feel... may take emotional responses to crime out of their everyday context: such measures may elicit more generalised attitudes rather than summarise the experience of fear in respondents everyday lives. On the other hand, intensity measures may focus on everyday experience, but their wording encourages an inaccurate précis of the frequency they feel fear. Put another way, standard measures may exaggerate the prevalence of everyday experiences. At the same time, fear of crime indicators may tap into more generalised attitudes to the risk and socio-cultural significance of crime even while we imagine they reflect everyday experiences of fear and crime. But the first port of call is to examine whether frequency and intensity measures do indeed produce different levels of fear. Farrall et al. (1997) found some striking differences using open-ended follow-ups. But this was a small and unrepresentative sample. Farrall, as part of an ESRC grant (2003), undertook an intensive design, piloting and field testing of a new measure of the fear of crime. This work suggested that filter questions were key to improving the measurement of the fear of crime (Sterngold et al. 1994) as this reduced the pressure on respondents to express concerns about a topic on which they had no strong feelings either way. Following piloting, the questions below were then fielded in an omnibus survey run by Taylor-Nelson SOFRES in Autumn 2002 on a nationally representative sample of England and Wales (n = 977): In the past year, have you ever actually felt fearful about the possibility of becoming a victim of crime? If yes, on the last occasion, how fearful did you feel? [0=cannot remember; 1=not very fearful; 2=a little bit fearful; 3=quite fearful; 4=very fearful.] If yes, how frequently have you felt like this in the last year? [0=cannot remember; 1=once or twice; 2=between three and six times; 3=seven to twelve times; 4=more than once a month.] Key to the question structure was a filter, a frequency item and an intensity item. This question structure allows us to explore not just intensity, or even just frequency, but to explore experiences of both intensity and frequency at the same time. In addition, by asking respondents to think back to the last specific occasion when they were fearful, the research grounds the responses in lived reality and more over the last time such feelings were encountered, rather than, for example, the most extreme experience which the respondent can recall. 9

10 4: Results Study One Study One had two sub-samples (A and B). Both sub-samples were nationally respresentative and did not vary on key demographic variables. Sub-sample A contained the new question structure as outlined above, while sub-sample B fielded the classic measure of the fear of crime, How safe do you feel walking alone in this area after dark? This way we could assess whether the old and new measures produce different estimates. Tables 1 and 2 summarise the results to the first two questions. Table 1: In the past year, have you ever felt fearful about becoming a victim of crime? (Sub-sample A) N % Yes No Don t know 10 1 TOTAL: Table 2: How frequently have you felt like this in the past year? * (Sub-sample A) N Raw % Cumulative % Once Twice Three times Four times Over four times Don t know TOTAL: * Asked only of those who reported feeling fearful in the past year. Around one third of the sample said that they had felt fearful in the previous year. Almost half of these respondents had felt fearful between one and four times. This means that just under fifteen per cent of the sample had felt fearful five times or more in the past year. For a discussion of the results from the third question on the intensity of fear of the last time, see Farrall and Gadd (2004). 4 We now compare these results from Sub-sample A to data from the standard fear of crime measure asked in Sub-sample B. Table 3 reports responses from the old measure of the fear of crime, and shows that just under one-fifth reported that they felt very unsafe walking alone in their area after dark. A further 17% said they felt a bit unsafe. Table 3: How safe do you feel walking alone in this area after dark? (Sub-sample B) N % Very safe Fairly safe A bit unsafe Very unsafe Don t know 14 1 TOTAL: Briefly, only around eight per cent of the total population who had experienced more than five fearful episodes felt quite or very fearful on the last occasion. 10

11 Summing the frequencies for the two unsafe responses, we find that an equivalent proportion of Sub-sample B felt unsafe (36 per cent) compared to respondents in Subsample A who had felt fearful about crime (37 per cent, Table 1). Yet, when asking for the frequency of fear, only 15 per cent of respondents in Sub-sample A had said they had felt fearful five times or more in the previous year. When the intensity of the last time on which respondents had felt fearful is considered, the percentage of respondents who had felt fearful five or more times in the last and who had felt very or quite fearful on the last occasion falls to eight (see Farrall & Gadd, 2004). It appears, therefore, that feeling unsafe does not always correspond to frequent experiences of fear about falling victim of crime, and, arguably, that the old measure inflates the percentage of people who are fearful by ignoring this qualification. 5: Results Study Two Study Two approached the issue from a slightly different angle. A small-scale postal survey was carried out with a randomly drawn sample of residents on the 2001 Electoral Roll in a rural part of England (a response rate of 18% yielded a sample of 1,023). All respondents were asked about the intensity and frequency of their worries about falling victim of a number of crimes. The question about the frequency with which worry had been experienced differed slightly from Study One, in that it referred to the past month. 5 While all respondents were given the frequency and intensity measures, a random sub-sample of half the respondents received the following filter question prior to receiving the frequency and intensity questions: In the past year, have you ever actually felt worried about the possibility of becoming a victim of crime in the street in this area (for example, being mugged or robbed or physically attacked)? [yes, no]. If respondents said no to this question they were not asked to answer the frequency and intensity questions about worry and critically, they were coded as not being worried. We hypothesise that the levels of intensity will, on average, be lower in the condition that receives the filter than in the condition that does not receive the filter. Or rather, filtering out those people who have not worried in the past year will reduce reported levels of intensity: we expect there to be some people who say they were worried without actually having worried recently. Let us leave aside the impact of the filter question for a moment, and commence our discussion with the raw data relating to the frequency and intensity of worry. Tables 4 and 5 present the data from the worry questions (averaged across the three types of personal victimisation). 5 Psychological research suggests that using a small time period increases the accuracy of recall, partly because this discourages the use of judgemental heuristics and inference strategies (Burton and Blair, 1991; Smith et al., 1991; Means and Loftus, 1991). Thus it is preferable to specify a small, concrete time period in such frequency questions as it encourages episode enumeration (Jackson, 2002Jackson, P. I. (1996). "Fear of crime: Interpreting victimization risk - Ferraro,KF." 25(2): ). 11

12 Table 4: How worried are you about being [attacked by a stranger in the street in this area/being harassed, threatened or verbally abused in the street in this area/being mugged in the street in this area]? * N Raw % Cumulative valid % Not at all worried Not very worried Fairly worried Very worried Missing TOTAL: *Responses to these three questions were averaged and rounded to produce one measure. Table 5: How often during the past month have you felt worried about the following things (if at all): being [harassed, threatened or verbally abused in the street in this area/being mugged in the street in this area]? * N Raw % Cumulative valid % Not once in the past month Once or twice in the past month About once a week Two or three times a week Every day Missing TOTAL: *Responses to these three questions were averaged and rounded to produce one measure. Respondents in Study Two also received the standard measure of the fear of crime, and their responses are given in Table 6 below. Table 6: How safe do you feel walking alone in this area after dark? N % Cumulative valid % Very safe Fairly safe A bit unsafe Very unsafe Missing 14 5 TOTAL: As in Study One, the safety question (Table 6) elicited higher prevalence rates of fear than the questions about the frequency and intensity of worry (Tables 4 and 5). For example, 15 per cent of respondents (Table 6) said they felt either a bit or very unsafe compared to 5 per cent who were worried about becoming a victim of personal crime (Table 4), and around 4 per cent who had worried at all during the previous month (Table 5). Indeed, only 0.9 per cent had worried more than once or twice in the past month (Table 5). How did intensity levels map onto frequency levels? Tables 7 and 8 explore, by way of crosstabulation, the levels of intensity of worry by first frequency of worry (Table 7) and then frequency of worry with perceptions of safety (Table 8). Table 7: Cross-tabulation of frequency of worry by intensity of worry Not once in the Once or twice About once Two or three Every TOTAL 12

13 past month in the past month a week times a week day % % % % % % Not at all worried Not very worried Fairly worried Very worried Pearson Chi-Square: = , p =.000 with df = 12. All figures are row percentages. One can see, from Tables 7, that being fairly or very worried corresponded to relatively low frequencies. For example, just under half of the sample who had reported being fairly worried also reported having not worried once in the past month (47.5%) and only ten per cent had worried more than once or twice in the same time period. Table 8: Cross-tabulation of frequency of worry by perceptions of safety walking alone in the area after dark Not once in the Once or twice About once Two or three Every TOTAL past month in the past month a week times a week day % % % % % % Very safe Fairly safe A bit unsafe Very unsafe Pearson Chi-Square = , p =.000 with df = 12. All figures are row percentages. Similarly, feeling a bit unsafe in fact equated to not have worried about personal crime during the previous month for over 84% of the respondents (Table 8). It would appear therefore from our detailed and exhaustive study of what being fairly or very worried actually meant in terms of lived experience that these terms ( fairly and very ) actually mean not often. Far, therefore, from the image of anxious citizens that frequently forms the backbone of the discourse in this arena. Let us, finally, return to the use of a filter question as promised above. By using a frequency filter question in an experimental manipulation, we are able to examine whether removing those individuals who had not felt worried in the past year reduces the overall picture of intensity levels gained from surveys on citizens anxieties. Table 9 reports the percentages of the sub-sample that received the filter (which we shall refer to as sub-sample A) who answered yes or no. One can see, for example, that only 10 per cent said that they had worried about becoming a victim of street crime in the past year. Table 9: In the past year, have you ever actually felt worried about the possibility of becoming a victim of crime in the street in this area (for example, being mugged or robbed or physically attacked)? (Sub-sample A). N % Yes to filter No to filter TOTAL: So, did the filter reduce reported worry levels? The answer is yes when respondents were asked about their intensity of worry (see Table 10) and no when asked in more detail about the frequency with which they worried during the previous month (see Table 11). The most important effect regards the very and fairly worried categories (Table 10). Without a filter, we would conclude that some 6.3% of our sample were worried. However, using a filter, this drops to 3.5%, or, roughly a half of the unfiltered estimate. Note also, that the Chi-Square 13

14 suggests that the differences of the two estimates are statistically significant, and therefore more likely to be a function of the experimental condition (filter/no filter) rather than the outcome of chance alone. Table 10: Cross-tabulation of intensity of worry by frequency filter Sub-sample A (Filter) % Sub-sample B (No Filter) % Not at all worried Not very worried Fairly worried Very worried TOTAL %: TOTAL N: Pearson Chi-Square: = 88.52, p <.0005 with df = 3. On the other hand, there is no major impact on the reports of frequency when we examine the impact of the filter question (Table 11). Table 11: Cross-tabulation of frequency of worry by frequency filter Sub-sample A (Filter) % Sub-sample B (No Filter) % Not once in the past month Once or twice in the past month About once a week Two or three times a week Every day TOTAL %: TOTAL N: Pearson Chi-Square: = 9.13, p =.058 with df = 4. 6: Discussion and Conclusion This article sought to examine whether new (and improved) measures of the fear of crime, originally outlined by Farrall (2003) produced different prevalence rates to old measures. The first study found, in a survey of a representative sample of England and Wales (Study One), that the classic indicator of fear, How safe do you feeling walking alone in this neighbourhood at night, produced higher levels than questions about how often people had been afraid of crime in the past year. We have thus revised downwards our estimate of the percentage of the population who are fearful from 36% ( a bit and very worried ) walking alone in their area after dark to 15% of people who had felt fearful five times or more in the last year. If one includes in the estimate those people who felt fairly or very fearful on the last occasion (as Farrall and Gadd, 2004 did), this figure falls to eight per cent. Potential differences between old and new questions were examined in more detail in Study Two. We found that self-reports of feeling fairly or very worried, or a bit or very unsafe, translated into relatively few actual instances of such experienced emotions. We also found that using a frequency filter actually reduced the levels of the intensity of worry. Here was evidence that some people in our sample who had not felt worried recently would have enunciated that they were worried about crime (if the filter had not removed their opportunity to do so). In summary then, eliciting intensities of worry and feelings of safety produced higher rates of fear than using measures of the frequency with which these occur. There are two explanations. First, there may be a range of technical, epistemological and conceptual 14

15 problems with standard measures of the fear of crime. This was essentially the argument put forward by Farrall et al. in their 1997 article. Standard measures thus serve to exaggerate the prevalence of everyday experiences. In some cases also, fear may be suppressed (see for example Sutton and Farrall, 2005). In sum, we believe that these contentions, by and large, are fair and supported by the evidence at hand. However, a further body of work adds to our understanding of the measurement of the fear of crime. This literature argues that crime does indeed represent something to respondents over and above measurement problems. This literature, often qualitative in its nature (see Bannister, 1993, Girling et al., 2000, for examples) highlights the salience of crime for people s understanding of the social cohesion and moral order of their communities Thus, in line with some of our anecdotal experiences (see Farrall, 2003, for an example), respondents in surveys use survey questions as an opportunity to express their concern and dislike for the morals and values of certain people, for a range of behaviours, including crime, and for the community conditions seen to be conducive to crime. And they do this even in the absence of everyday experiences of fear. It may be then, that people successfully manage their day-to-day risk through their actions and behaviours. Rarely (if at all) feeling unsafe or in a worrying situation, they still however hold particular attitudes towards crime. Such attitudes constitute less of an everyday experience component of the fear of crime, and more an evaluation of the meaning of crime for themselves and their communities. In other words, respondents who may not have actually felt worried recently yet still report heightened levels of worry in surveys. Respondents thus express their (understandable) dislike of crime, criminals and certain features of their community. The intriguing results that we have reported above certainly require replication. Our proposed explanations certainly need both more thought on our part and more research in general. But here is provisional evidence that intensity measures tap into something more than many researchers seem to assume more than just a quick summary of the level of experience of fear in respondents everyday lives. In short, it matters how you measure the fear of crime. The normative question then becomes: do we treat both aspects (i.e. experiences of actual fearful moments and some more expressive survey responses) as fear? Can we say that intensity measures exaggerate the prevalence of worry about crime in people s everyday lives? Reports of fear of crime in modern societies leave the impression that significant proportions of the population are afraid. However, wrapped up in this may be the exaggeration of such feelings by poor question design, and the use of such questions on the part of respondents to express their dislike of crime, their concern about community. The reporting by policy-makers, evaluators and the media takes for-granted that the estimates of fear (and similar emotions) are valid and precise (i.e. that a figure of 36 per cent of people being worried about crime means that 36 per cent of people at any one given moment are anxious that they may be a victim of crime or in some way experience a criminal event). We have shown this assumption to be false. Bibliography Bannister, J. (1993). "Locating Fear: Environmental and Ontological Security", in Crime And The Urban Environment, edited by H. Jones. Aldershot: Avebury. Bernard, Y. (1992). North American & European Research on Fear of Crime. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 41, 1, Biderman, A. D., Johnson, L. A., McIntyre, J. and Weir, A. W. (1967). "Report on a Pilot Study in the District of Columbia on Victimization and Attitudes Toward Law 15

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