It is very important to also address the ethics of this research, as it collects personal information from people, as well as spatial and temporal tags of their locations and whereabouts while asking them about a topic with an emotional tint to it. There are three main potential ethical concerns to consider:
1. Collecting location data
2. Putting participants in dangerous situations
3. Increasing fear of crime in participants by making it more salient in their minds.
Collecting spatial information about people’s activity patterns can be a sen- sitive issue. This information could potentially be used to track people without their consent. By looking at the times and repeat locations, it is easy to work out where participants live, where they work, and where they spend their leisure time. This information is quite sensitive, especially when linked up with per- sonal data. To ensure the safeguarding of this data, fear of crime reports with the spatial and temporal information were sent to a separate server than the de-
7.4. Ethics 187 mographic information. The data was only linked up for the purpose of the anal- ysis, after which it was de-coupled again. Ethics approval was sought by the university ethics committee, and several iterations of the application were con- sidered, before it reached final form, and was accepted by the University Ethics Committee (UCL Research Ethics Committee Project ID Number: 3692/004). The key important messages were to only take spatial information when the user explicitly submitted this. While some applications might track people and get their location at some specific time interval, the FOCApp took location in- formation only when the participants submitted a report. Also, great care was taken to ensure that participants were aware that they are submitting their ge- ographical location each time they completed the survey, and that they did not send any reports from areas where they did not want to be located to. Intervie- wees all noted that they understood that they were sending their locations with each report, and did not worry about being tracked at other times.
The second issue is with participants putting themselves in dangerous sit- uations to provide data. This could take the form of participants visiting areas they perceive to be dangerous, or by participants having their valuable smart- phones exposed in potentially vulnerable locations. To guard against these issues, participants were given detailed instructions during the briefing, that the study is interested in their routine activities, and so it is preferred that they do not deviate from the routes they normally take and do not behave in a way that is not in accordance with their usual patterns of activity. The following statement was also sent out with the application:
We would like to stress that you do not put yourself in vulnerable situations during the course of this study. We advise that if you experience a situation where you feel unsafe, you first remove yourself from the situation, and use the ’Report a previous incident’ option once you are back in a safe place.
In the interviews, all participants confirmed that they had noted this mes- sage and that none of them visited new areas as a result of the study, but instead carried out their daily activities as normal. The participant who had al- most had her phone snatched said that she was not using the application at the time, but was making a phone call, and did not use the application to report the
incident until later, from a safe place. From this pilot, it can be concluded that people did not put themselves or their phones in risky situations as a result of participation in the study.
The final issue discussed here has to do with increasing fear of crime in participants as a result of repeatedly asking them about it, increasing the salience of crime and potential victimisation in their minds. While the intervie- wees all denied feeling increased fear of crime as a result of participating in this survey, it is possible that they did not overtly realise this, or that they were hoping to not look worried in the eyes of the interviewer. However in order to measure fear of crime, a question must be asked, and it can be argued that other methods of asking people about fear of crime could also have similar ef- fects. Overall, however, there was no steady increase in fear of crime reported over time in any of the pilot participants. This can be monitored in participants of the longer study, and if it appears that their fear levels increase with longer participation in the study, then perhaps the argument should be made against measuring fear of crime in this way, as it might have negative effects on the study participants.
7.5
Discussion
This chapter has proposed a new approach to studying fear of crime to support framing it as a dynamic and micro level experience, lived by people as they go about their routine activities. To support this approach, Section 7.1 and 7.2 described in detail how a new measurement tool was developed and tested, for the purpose of collecting empirical data about fear of crime as an experience, that also has spatial and temporal information. While small, the trial of the FOCApp described here suggests firmly that fear of crime is indeed a dynamic variable that changes within a person over place and time as well as between people. Any data collection procedure that does not recognise this is subject to averaging and aggregation bias and if enquiring about feelings too far in the past, many other forms of survey bias, as discussed in Chapter 3. Finally, Section 7.4 details some important ethical considerations that must be taken into account with the development of this new research approach.
7.5. Discussion 189 Overall, initial indications from the data presented here suggest that re- ports of fear events were tied to specific situations (such as the witnessing of a potential bicycle theft), and most reports are of people feeling ’Not at all wor- ried’. The next chapter will describe in greater detail the wealth of information about dynamic and small-scale variability in fear of crime experiences within people. By conducting a four-month study of a larger group of participants using the application, more detailed insight into dynamic, within-person fluctu- ation in fear of crime can be attained. There, limitations of this approach will be further detailed, along with lessons learned to inform future work hoping to adopt similar techniques, alongside an illustration, with data from the study, of the possible new insight that can be gained from an environmental approach to studying fear of crime.
Chapter 8
Fear of crime as a
context-dependent experience
Chapter 7 provided a detailed outline of the development and validation of a research tool for the measurement of fear of crime as a dynamic, everyday experience. This chapter describes a four-month long study utilising this re- search tool. Emphasis on study deployment and lessons learned will hope to inform future work adopting similar techniques. Accordingly, Section 8.1 fo- cuses on the study design, and Section 8.2 details the study sample. Section 8.3 presents descriptive findings of within-person variation in fear of crime, as people move across different activities. This will be discussed to give an illus- tration of the novel insight into fear of crime that can be attained by collecting information in this way. Section 8.4 then uses the new data collected with FO- CApp to identify situational co-variates of fear events. Then Section 8.5 outlines two examples, to illustrate the potential impact of adopting this methodology for the study and measurement of fear of crime. Finally Section 8.6 discusses the strengths, limitations, and impact of how the FOCApp measurement tool is ca- pable of recording fear of crime experiences in a way to demonstrate how fear varies within people with situational factors. It also serves to illustrate how this approach can be used to gain new insight into people’s experience with fear of crime, and inform situational prevention measures aimed at reducing these fear experiences.
8.1
Study design
The design of this study is that of a longitudinal study, framed as an extended case study. It is a prospective rather than retrospective study, as participants’ fear of crime is measured from the start of the study and throughout its duration. Further, a within-subject design was used as all participants were measured with the pre-experiment questionnaire and were asked to use FOCApp for the duration of the entire study, taking repeated measures from them while they participated.
Participants were recruited through the university’s weekly newsletter, which contains a section that advertises studies looking for participants. Ad- vertising of the study was also carried out using social media (Twitter and Facebook), posting in online forums, and flyering on the street near busy tube stations in the Camden area. To incentivise participants, a monthly draw for an Amazon gift card was advertised. Participants were told that the more re- ports they submitted, the more times their name would be entered in the draw, which was hoped to increase not only people signing up, but also to sustain participation, and ensure that people stay with the study over the long time of 4 months. Participant recruitment started 3 weeks prior to the start of the study, but recruitment waves continued during the study as well. Figure 8.1 shows the number of devices which had the application installed every day from its launch until time of writing, demonstrating that there were peaks of downloads (which correspond to pushes in recruitment) throughout the study duration.
Figure 8.1: FOCApp downloads from Google Play Statistics
Instructions for participants were posted in the adverts, social media posts, and flyers. The instructions were also in the description of the application on
8.2. Study sample 193