Data

Before moving on to the empirical chapters, a brief introduction to the data used throughout the thesis should be presented. As these data sources are used throughout, they will be introduced here all at once, rather than multiple times in the individual chapters.

3.6.1.1

Openly available crowdsourced data

The crowdsourced VGI data used in this thesis comes from an online problem- reporting tool called Fixmystreet (www.fixmystreet.com (hereon referred to as FMS)), run by the not-for-profit organisation mySociety, who aim to ”invent and popularise digital tools that enable citizens to exert power over institutions and decision makers” (MySociety, 2016). They created FMS to enable citizens to report potholes, broken street lights, and other problems in their area as easily as possible, in order to get them fixed. Using the website, citizens are able to locate their problem on a map to provide exact coordinates, choose a cate- gory for their report, give it a title, and provide a brief description. The report is logged with the time and date of reporting, and the name of the person sub- mitting the report (unless they choose to remain anonymous). Once the report is submitted, it is emailed to the responsible local authority immediately. As of 2010, local councils in the United Kingdom such as Bromley Borough Council in North-West London have been integrating the platform into their own website, indicating to citizens that their comments are noted and responded to by their local authority. By providing this platform, FMS facilitates the crowdsourced collection of issues which people encounter in their day-to-day activities.

While this data is available nationwide, similar sites also exist in other coun- tries as well, beyond the United Kingdom, making this approach transferable and reproducible internationally, to acquire similar data elsewhere. For exam- ple, ”Fiks Gata Mi” in Norway, ”Buiten Beter” in the Netherlands, ”It’s Buggered Mate” in Australia, ”Giv et Praj” (Kbenhavn version) in Denmark, ”SeeClickFix” in the United States, ”SeeClickFix en franais” in France, and ”FixMyStreet New Zealand” in New Zealand (Worth, 2011). Therefore, while this thesis focuses on the case study of London, UK (discussed in next section), there is no reason why this could not be translated to anywhere else in the world that is equipped with such crowdsourced complaints data. This is one major advantage of using such data sets. They already exist and cover large areas, eliminating the need for bespoke data collection exercises that require great resources.

3.6. Notes on data and unit of analysis for throughout this thesis 85 hosted by MySociety, this does not necessarily mean that it is in a form that is readily accessible to the researcher to use. In this case, the data needed to be downloaded and compiled in such a way that it would be available for analysis. One way to acquire such data is by carrying out what is referred to as a scrape of the data from the web page. Web scraping refers to developing and running an application that processes the HTML of a web page to extract data for manipulation. In the case of FMS, I wrote a script using Java program- ming languages that would open up each report, save the relevant information, close the report and move on to the next one. This script iterated through the hundreds of thousands of reports made on FMS, compiling the data to such a format where it was easily usable for research purposes. It is important to note here that this was done with the full permission of MySociety. Using this method, I collected 5 years worth of data that included the following for each report:

• Latitude and Longitude

• Topic of report (eg: ’Graffiti’ or ’Litter’) • Time and date when the report was made

• Name of person reporting (if given, ’anonymous’ if not) • Detailed description of the report

The resulting database contained 276,656 usable entries for the United Kingdom after data cleaning. Chapter 4 is devoted to a detailed description of this data, including exploring its accuracy and possible biases, before Chapters 5 and 6 examine its application to research into active guardianship and signal disorders respectively.

3.6.1.2

Bespoke data collection tool

As discussed, one theoretical contribution of this thesis is to frame fear of crime as something that is continuous and changes dynamically as people move across the whole of their activity spaces. By taking this approach, and finding

empirical data to support it, the extant literature on fear of crime can be supple- mented by situational information that is currently an unknown. To achieve this, I developed a new measurement tool incorporating the longitudinal approach of the experience sampling method (ESM) with the crowdsourcing approach of volunteered geographical information. This tool is a smartphone application, the development of which will be presented in great detail in Chapter 7. This tool allows for the measurement of fear of crime in real time (or as soon as pos- sible after the event) and the collection of empirical data to reflect the dynamic variation in this experience, illustrating its situational nature. Chapter 8 demon- strates the ability of this tool to measure within-person variation in fear of crime, and thereby demonstrate that it is not a static characteristic that people have.

3.6.1.3

Traditionally collected data

In order to be able to establish how the new approaches to measuring per- ception of crime and place compare with existing measures, various reference data sources were used. While most of these will be detailed in the chapters where they appear, as they are used only once, a general introduction to the Metropolitan Police Public Attitudes Survey is worth being made here, as this data set features in all the empirical chapters.

The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) has commissioned a Public Atti- tudes Survey (PAS) annually since 1983 with the objective of eliciting London- ers’ perceptions of policing needs, priorities and experiences (BMG Research, 2014). From April 2014, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) took responsibility for the survey (Mayors Office for Policing and Crime, 2016). Conducted on a continuous basis, through a programme of face-to-face inter- views at the homes of respondents, the PAS obtains responses from a random probability sample of residents in each of the 32 boroughs across London that are policed by the MPS. Approximately 1,067 interviews per month are carried out, equating to approximately 100 interviews per Borough per quarter (BMG Research, 2014).

The PAS has been used in crime research on topics like citizens’ confi- dence in the police (for example see Bradford et al. (2009); Hohl et al. (2010)),

3.6. Notes on data and unit of analysis for throughout this thesis 87 and the relationship between neighbourhood characteristics like collective effi- cacy and crime (for example see Sutherland et al. (2013)). The topics covered in the PAS which are relevant to this thesis include local area and community, fear of crime and local crime problems, and anti-social behaviour (Mayors Of- fice for Policing and Crime, 2016).