Measuring Fear of Crime - Perceptual, Affective, and Behavior Components

• NCJ Number: 85027
• Author(s): T L Baumer; D P Rosenbaum
• Date Published: Unknown
• Length: 122 pages
• Grant Number(s): 79-NI-AX-0124
• Sponsoring Agency: US Dept of Justice; US Dept of Justice NIJ Pub
• Corporate Author: Westinghouse Evaluation Institute
• Sale Source: National Institute of Justice/
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This is the final report of a methodological study designed to develop and validate measures of 'fear of crime'; a conceptual framework, final measurement scales, and appropriate documentation are presented.

Abstract

The purpose of the project was to place the fear of crime issue within a broader theoretical framework, identify its principal components, develop multi-item measures of these components, and document the scale characteristics. Initial activities involved review of the literature, interviews with community residents, and development of fear of crime survey questions to identify the variable universe. Subsequent work concerned theoretical integration into a broader framework and data reduction. Stress theory provided the most amiable fit to the data and was employed as the guiding framework. Three scales of related constructs were developed. The first concerned beliefs about the amount of crime in the respondents' immediate neighborhood. The final measure was labeled 'perceptions of crime,' and contained three items focusing on robbery, assault, and general level of crime in the neighborhood. The second scale was designed to measure the affective component of the fear of crime issue. In contrast to the perceptions of crime scale, this measure was distinctly evaluative; it is used as a four-item scale of concern for personal safety to subjectively assess amount of crime and its significance for the respondent. The final area concerned behavioral adaptation to the threat of crime, with an avoidance of street crime scale composed of three items focusing on going out at night alone, avoiding certain types of people, and walking on particular streets at night. These three scales should prove to be very useful to researchers in the area of community crime prevention and public opinion. They are both internally consistent and represent distinct but interrelated phenomena. Thirty tables and approximately 50 references are included; a survey and interview schedule are appended.