Large-scale surveys of a general population are very popular in the social sciences. In criminology, a growing interest in survey methodology has been observable since the 1950s. One major reason for the growing body of research in this tradition can be found in the discovery of bias in official measurement instruments, more specifically the bias in police statistics. Official statistics tend to underestimate true rates of victimisation in the population, and are said to be seriously biased with respect to race, gender and social class. As a consequence, the validity of earlier research concerned
with the causes of crime has been called into question. Another important reason for the widespread interest in surveys lies in their potential to serve as a means to empirically test causal theories of offending, victimisation and fear of crime. Studies on the causes of crime and victimisation have disappeared from the agenda of criminologists in Belgium to make room for the study of the criminal justice system (Goethals, Ponsaers, Beyens, Pauwels and Devroe, 2002). In Anglo-Saxon countries, victim surveys and to a lesser extent self-report studies were periodically repeated on a large scale
and were used to describe the epidemiology of crime and to address theoretical issues. The British Crime Survey and the (US) National Crime Survey are well-known examples. In one of the first sweeps of the National Crime Survey widespread anxiety about crime was discovered, and the ‘fear of crime’ was born (Ditton and Farral, 2000; Hale, 1996). ‘Fear of crime’ as a distinct field of criminological research can be traced back to Lyndon Johnson’s 1967 Crime Surveys. Originally the level of public concern about crime was interpreted as an indicator of the importance politicians should attach to crime rates. High levels of concern were taken to imply the need to reduce crime levels. They were not read as a diagnosis of a public malaise to be treated in its own right. Concern for crime seemed to be confused with fear of crime. Although a large body of research concentrates on the subject internationally, in Belgium this is not the case and therefore we follow Pleysier, Vervaeke and Goethals (2002) and prefer to talk about a research tradition under development (Pauwels and Pleysier, 2005a). Notwithstanding the massive body of research since the ‘fear of crime’ concept was
‘empirically discovered’, two issues in this research tradition stand out in explaining the overall pessimism in most reviews of the literature (Ditton and Farrall, 2000; Hale, 1996; Pleysier, Pauwels, Vervaeke and Goethals, 2005; Pleysier, Vervaeke and Goethals, 2004; Vanderveen, 2006). A first issue, which we will deal with in this paper, concerns the weak theoretical and conceptual framework surrounding studies of ‘fear of crime’. Obviously, both the policy-driven character of the early – and later – large-scale victim surveys and the positivistic approach of the era in which ‘fear of crime’ research originated are largely indebted to this. A second issue – which follows from the first
issue – is related to problems of measurement: studies of fear of crime, especially the studies that are conducted on demand of the Ministry of the Interior, use somewhat conservative outdated methodologies and measures of fear of crime. Because the ‘fear of crime’ concept in these large-scale surveys, as well as in many smaller initiatives, for reasons of ‘comparability’, was predominantly measured with one single indicator (i.e. ‘How safe do you, or would you, feel walking alone in this area after dark?’), all claims concerning the reliability and validity were considered questionable. In recent
years, numerous authors have indeed objected to this conservative approach, and has resulted in a tendency to use scaling techniques, instead of the traditional standard items. Nevertheless, the complexity of a concept such as fear of crime demands further studies on the different components of fear, before one moves on to an explanation of fear based on survey data.