This paper demonstrates the use of mixed methods discovery techniques to explore public perceptions of community safety and risk, using computational techniques that combine and integrate layers of information to reveal connections between community and place. Perceived vulnerability to crime is conceptualised using an etic/emic framework. The etic “outsider” viewpoint imposes its categorisation of vulnerability not only on areas (“crime hot spots” or “deprived neighbourhoods”) but also on socially constructed groupings of individuals (the “sick” or the “poor”) based on particular qualities considered relevant by the analyst. The range of qualities is often both narrow and shallow. The alternative, emic, “insider” perspective explores vulnerability based on the meanings held by the individuals informed by their lived experience. Using recorded crime data and Census-derived area classifications, we categorise an area in Southern England from an etic viewpoint. Mobile interviews with local residents and police community support officers and researcher-led environmental audits provide qualitative emic data. GIS software provides spatial context to analytically link both quantitative and qualitative data. We demonstrate how this approach reveals hidden sources of community resilience and produces findings that explicate low level social disorder and vandalism as turns in a “dialogue” of resistance against urbanisation and property development.
This paper demonstrates the use of computationally based mixed methods discovery techniques to enhance the power and analytical reach of fieldwork in the study of crime risk and public safety. The substantive focus of this paper is on community safety and the perception of risk from crime and social disorder at neighbourhood level. Our conceptual focus is on the application of an etic/emic framework for vulnerability to crime. Our methodological focus is on a mixed methods approach using software to help combine and integrate layers of information to reveal connections between community, crime, and place. This demonstrator study draws on primary empirical data from fieldwork at sites and in criminal justice settings in a contemporary English town.
In countries like the US and the UK the policy register for research on safety and risk is “community policing.” Police forces and police researchers in such countries have developed the diagnostic activity of the “environmental scan” as a tool to gauge public risk perception in so far as it relates to the built environment. The present official system for community policing in England and Wales is labelled “Neighbourhood Policing.” Neighbourhood policing includes the practice of the environmental scan alongside community consultation and crime audits. Our research seeks to extend environmental scan methodologies by new procedures and IT tools. However, we also have a conceptual or analytic objective.
In our analysis, procedures like the environmental scan are one-way practices that presume that the police and State are always benign and that the noncriminal public always stand beside them. We are interested in developing a richer conceptual frame that recognises not only the unintended criminogenic consequences of official interventions but also the social pathologies driven by competing interest groups against a backcloth of general public indifference in communities where crime and disorder are a relatively modest part of everyday life. We are not arguing that the public are indifferent to crime and social disorder but that public sentiment is intermittent, being mobilised largely by the reporting of high profile crimes or when personally touched by crime as a victim or when victims are in one’s proximal social network [
The field of community safety and risk perception has been dominated by an understandable but empirically questionable assumption that crime and disorder are major stressors and concerns for the general public. These assumptions may be an artefact of the survey methods that are the principal source of our understanding of crime fear. Within an international context of steadily falling crime rates, England and Wales are themselves relatively low crime countries. To better direct our limited resources of crime prevention, public reassurance, and crime detection to areas where there is a real need, we must get to better know our communities. Such an agenda applies to recent interventions based on “participatory appraisal,” where policy is informed by research that involves community participants mapping points of importance to them (see Fielding and Cisneros-Puebla [
A useful framework for exploring these ideas of risk and safety in the community is that of an emic and etic conceptualisation of vulnerability [
An etic perspective defines risk from an “outsiders” viewpoint, thus imposing the vulnerable categorisation not only on areas (such as “crime hot spots” or “deprived neighbourhoods”) but also on groupings of individuals, often based on their assumed dependency (such as the “sick” and the “poor”). The groupings are generally underpinned by relative position in respect of a limited range of sociodemographic indicators, drawn together around a broad, monochrome label. The alternative, emic, perspective explores vulnerability based on the meanings held by the individuals informed by their lived experience and expressed in their own terms. Individuals classified as “vulnerable” from an etic perspective may not
An approach combining both perspectives necessarily involves a mixed methods research design. In the case of our research, police-recorded crime data and area classifications derived from Census data are used to categorise a local area from an etic viewpoint, emulating a standard approach to inference from population characteristics. Mobile interviews with local residents and police community support officers (PCSOs) and researcher-led environmental audits, conducted while being on accompanied walks around the area discussing and recording visible risk/reassurance indicators, provide additional layers of data from an emic viewpoint. To handle such a variety of data types, several software tools were needed as profiled in Figure
Data sources and technology and software tools for collection and analysis.
Figure
In the present context such an exploration calls on us methodologically to address the question of the basis on which sociodemographic and crime profile data produced from secondary data can be compared with primary data based on local intelligence derived from fieldwork. Our general premise is that this requires drilling down to match as closely as possible the secondary data to the specific contextual characteristics of the primary data. Secondary and primary data should be matched as closely as possible in time, duration, and period and likewise in place and space. The temporal consideration requires us to align the time at which secondary data were drawn with that of the specific episode of data elicitation and, in respect of recall data, the time to which respondents refer and/or the time when physical artefacts in question were present (e.g., the date of closure of a factory that became derelict, affording illicit play space, and vandalism opportunities). As the factory example suggests, duration may be lengthy or ephemeral (e.g., in many jurisdictions local government commits to removing abandoned vehicles within a few working days). Period may be addressed by seeking to capture the “crisis point” at which a crime-related phenomenon is in the public eye. In terms of secondary data this can sometimes be captured by peaks in media reports and/or the drawing up and publication of special editions of official data examining a given issue in detail in response to public concern; this happened, for instance, in the mid 1980s following high profile cases of “network” sexual abuse of children [
As we will see, the scope for precision in matching secondary and primary data is increasing on the back of “open data” initiatives and the willingness of commercial data providers to grant access to datasets produced for other purposes, but there remain significant constraints that must be negotiated. At the broadest level, the hallmark problem of secondary data is granularity—coverage may be insufficiently “micro,” or, when it is sufficiently geolocal, exact locations may be deliberately obscured to protect citizen identity or sensitive locations (e.g., military facilities). At the broadest level, the hallmark problem of primary data is the established issues of reliability (transferability to other settings) and validity (accuracy of subjective accounts of social phenomenon elicited from respondents). In both cases, these issues can be addressed by a mixed methods research design and comparative analysis, although certainty will always be bounded by the generic epistemology of interpretive social science.
An important matter in a locally based study is the ethical dimension of site selection. Both fieldwork methods and georeferencing challenge the participant anonymisation convention that social researchers normally adopt. We do not attempt to disguise the location of the fieldwork site in this paper, because we believe that the data to be considered here are not especially contentious and cannot be tied to individual respondents (only the site is identified; the anonymisation convention is observed in relation to individuals quoted or discussed). But we do need to recognise that the more fine-grained our methods are, the greater are the concerns over identifiability and that sophisticated technology has a role in this. Its affordances include means by which anonymity can more readily be penetrated, and consideration of technical protections is an important part of proceeding ethically.
The research site discussed in this paper was chosen as an instance of a mixed residential community with population and tenure stability that nevertheless had a historically problematic reputation and was “socially deprived” in the context of this area. Figure
Profile of the district (granted borough status in 1974). Note: circle indicates sample area. Source: IMD 2010 [
We now turn to a profile of crime and disorder in the area. In Figure
Recorded crime rates per 1000 population and the vulnerable localities index. Circle indicates sample area.
Figure
Area classifications and crime event data. Numbers indicate crime events at postcode centroid.
So what was the local public’s feeling about crime and disorder in their area? Did
In the same 2004 Community Safety Survey, analysis (see Figure
Problems in the neighbourhood and worry about being a victim of crime.
It is, of course, the multidimensional picture we get from combining methods that enables techniques of discovery. Thus, the quantitative and spatial analysis element gave a useful etic baseline against which to compare the primary data from the qualitative fieldwork procedures, to which we looked for insight into the emic dimension.
The tracks and conversations of mobile interviews with local people, community representatives, and PCSOs were recorded while walking around a route chosen by them within the locality (participants were simply asked to take the researcher on a walk round notable places in their locale and to comment on why places were notable). In this demonstrator project we conducted six mobile interviews with residents, one with the local PCSO and two researcher-led community audits. The residents interviewed comprised four females aged between 30 and 40 and two older males, one aged between 50 and 60 and the other over 70. All respondents had lived within the area for at least four years, and most for much longer, and had children, grandchildren or, in the case of the oldest male, great grandchildren. The PCSO interviewed lived outside the area. We called these “mobile interviews” but they are often also referred to as “walk-along” interviews. The unaccompanied environmental scans of the area were conducted using a smartphone running SurveyToGo software to log the instances, geographical position, and any artefacts of incivilities that were observed (e.g., abandoned cars) or of events that had taken place (e.g., marks on buildings from objects thrown at them). This methodology is based on the environmental scan techniques developed by Fielding et al. [
To give a sense of the mobile fieldwork, Figure
Mobile Interviews tracks in Google Earth. Source: Google Earth ©2013 Infoterra Ltd & Bluesky.
Social capital theory [
The “signal crimes” perspective applied by Innes and Fielding [
The crime and disorder reality of the fieldwork site involved in the present study was a great deal more humdrum than that, but it does give us some examples of similar knowledge resources in action.
One street within the study area had gained a bad reputation over many years and was mentioned by all but one of the respondents at some point during the walking interviews. One respondent who lived near this street,
Yet, those who live in the street have a more measured response and even an explanation for its bad reputation:
And the same resident said that
And another resident explained that
Although milder in scale, these comments indicate a similar phenomenon to the rape example, around the more general theme of a street’s reputation. Those living closest to the actual problems were able to isolate the specific locations in their minds and still see the positives around them.
Note that the presentation of crime data on the police public website [
In areas of the sort we researched, medium and major serious crime is rare, but incivilities such as shouting matches between neighbours, egg and stone throwing at houses, and the routine vandalism of plantings, gates, and signs gave parts of the area a character that was reflected in expressions of real uneasiness and frustration on the part of our respondents. For the most part these were people who were active in the community and who seemed to go out of their way to find the positives in their community and its residents, so we would argue that the frustrations and fears they expressed would be all the more likely in others who were less active, less in the know, and more housebound.
Importantly for analysis, though, we collected examples of ways in which such individuals made their own accommodations to the circumstances in which they found themselves. Formal agencies were certainly part of the landscape through which individuals negotiated their way to their objectives, but individuals typecast the function of such agencies and seldom regarded them as flexible resources available to them or as a gateway to such resources. Instead, they sought to negotiate obstacles to their goals by taking direct, individual initiative. For instance, a woman with two school age children, who, following divorce, was no longer able to afford to live in the area of town in which she had grown up, confronted the problem of poor schooling in the district to which she had been obliged to move. She was concerned about the potential influence of local children with whom her own children may come in contact. Rather than seeking official interventions against the unruly children in her new neighbourhood, she resolved the problem by converting from one Christian denomination to another, gaining access for her children to a faith school with high standards. Also concerned about after-school contact, she confined the play area of her children and regulated their use of bicycles.
Having briefly profiled the community’s informal social resources, we now turn to the role of official agencies. We customarily think of frontline agencies such as the police, the local authority, housing associations, social services, and the youth service as agencies unambiguously arrayed against crime and disorder. However, our research has sensitised us not only to the positive effects of interventions by these agencies but to the unintended criminogenic consequences of some of their policies and actions. These are attested by the comments from several of the respondents about the parking problems in the area. A typical example is expressed by one respondent:
Another respondent goes on to mention a more serious consequence of the parking problems in the area:
A local authority planning department that stipulates a limited number of parking spaces for a new housing development on the basis that use of the car is to be discouraged and people must be nudged to use public transport may produce a feel-good effect in town hall but is also highly likely to create tensions between the development’s residents as they struggle over limited parking and trouble for pedestrians and emergency services with obstructed footpaths and verges.
One revealing example of the way in which the policies and decisions of formal agencies can have unintended criminogenic effects which require closely engaged local fieldwork to discover came to us as a direct result of the technology-enhanced methods of discovery we were using. The example concerns persistent antisocial behaviour at a particular new estate of mixed social and owner-occupier housing which came up in the interview with the PCSO while walking through the area:
To explore the reported levels of antisocial behaviour in the area, we first turned to the mapped images and explored the physical location of the area in Google Earth. We sought to further explore another issue mentioned by five of the seven respondents while they were walking through the same area—that the new estate used to be the site of an old factory:
Using historical Google Earth imagery, we were able to explore the area in 2004 and again in 2010. It is thus straightforward to see how the location of interest has changed over recent time. The two images seen in Figure
Loss of amenity space—Google Earth images compared within ATLAS.ti v6. Source: Google Earth: (2004 image) Image ©2009 Getmapping plc; Image ©2009 DigitalGlobe; Image ©2009 The GeoInformation. Group (2010 image) ©2010 Infoterra Ltd & Bluesky.
One of our respondents, a resident of the new estate thus created, told us how she had been troubled by youths throwing eggs at the houses on the estate. Another respondent, in the course of bemoaning the obtrusive three-storey block, latterly built here for social housing on the periphery of the estate (see Google Street View Image in Figure
Google Street View image of social housing block on periphery of new estate. Source: Google Earth Street View © Google 2013.
Looking at these images, these accounts suggest to us that the egg-throwing reported by residents may be an expression of resentment at a lost amenity, reinforced by the exclusionary nature of the high fences. In a full-scale study this hypothesis would, of course, be subject of a “member check” procedure. Now that the fences had been lowered, removing the perceived barrier between this new estate and the old established estates in the neighbourhood, it would seem to have reduced the unintended barrier which, according to our fieldwork respondents, incited neighbourhood rivalries leading to antisocial behaviour.
Ironically, the victims of this antisocial behaviour appeared to be the social-housing tenants who were most similar in sociodemographic background to the assumed perpetrators implicated by the victims.
To the urban planner, the waste ground adjacent to an old factory may merely be disused, but to local people it may be a site with a valued use but one that is invisible to officialdom, a case analogous to the “urban gardens” that local residents had created on waste ground in Knigge and Cope’s [
To explore the impact of the PCSO’s interventions in setting up a neighbourhood watch scheme and the local resident’s perceptions of improvements in the area once the high fence was removed, we explored the local crime trends in the area since our fieldwork was completed. Using the
Box drawn to define new estate boundaries showing crime events for a selected month. Source:
However, plotting quarterly crime in this area over the same period in comparison with the wider borough area of Old Woking (see Figure
Total recorded crimes on the new estate in comparison with the wider local area. Source:
A further indication of the locale’s microhistory that may colour attitudes and condition antisocial behaviour in the area relates to another nearby development. Close to the location shown in Figure
Future development site in Google Earth. Source: Google Earth: ©2011 Tele Atlas: ©2011 Infoterra & Bluesky.
The community that lived on either side of this strip had a mixed reputation as asserted by the PCSO while walking through this area:
This central strip of land appears to have been a central feature of the communities around it with stories of informal cricket and football games, and as can be seen in this Google Earth image, there are lots of free parking spaces. During the fieldwork period, development went ahead and this green “stripe” was being built upon (the near-completed development is now visible in Google Street View), despite a long campaign against the developers. On the basis of the suggestive evidence presented above, we might speculate that the first occupants of the new houses being built there could encounter antisocial behaviour problems, especially in view of the shape of the site. The area appeared to function as both an informal boundary and an uncontested pressure valve for informal uses such as impromptu sports and play and overflow parking. Its useful but unofficial amenity may have helped reduce local tensions of a kind so regular as often to be dismissed as background “noise,” a function lost due to the new housing development. To inform such hypotheses we needed both the “hard” or objective information about the physical topography and built environment of the area over time and the testimony about activities in the area provided by the mobile interviews.
We began the discussion in this paper with a distinction between emic and etic approaches, arguing that information from both is necessary to get a holistic picture and that the crime risk and community safety field is dominated by work using an etic approach. That approach offers an external perspective from outside the phenomenon, and its focus on structures and regularities gives it an affinity for quantitative methods. It answers questions about perceived risk and safety by offering findings on the lines of “this is a place where older/disabled people are objectively more vulnerable.” The emic approach gives an insider’s viewpoint, looking at the issue from a participant’s perspective. It helps us answer questions like “why do some people feel more vulnerable in this place than others?” From a law enforcement and criminal justice priority-setting perspective, we need to be able to answer both kinds of questions, so this is not a case for the superiority of one method or heuristic over another but for understanding their interaction.
While we would support what is now the fairly commonplace view that mixed methods offer a more holistic picture [
We anticipate that these technical developments, including increasing interoperability between different IT tools, may bring about a revival of some of the elegant work on the criminal area associated with the classic urban ecology studies of figures such as Morris [
The more nuanced understanding of the perceived risk of crime based on combining the emic and etic dimensions in a mixed methods research design facilitated by new research technologies carries implications for research on the fear of crime more generally. The stream of research engendered by applications of Putnam’s conceptualisation of social capital [
The extent of the fear of crime literature and the robustness of the studies comprising it make it possible and legitimate to apply the techniques of secondary analysis, such as those of the systematic review, to the literature reporting primary studies. When this is done, some clear regularities in the results of primary studies emerge. These regularities are consistent with the broad lines of analysis, and the methodological techniques used, in the research reported in the present paper. Thus, Lorenc et al. [
The original focus of the Lorenc et al. review was on the built (physical) environment but early in their work this was widened to include the social environment. This revealed interesting enculturated thinking and mechanisms behind thoughts on the built environment; for example, those measures such as locks, fencing, and secure entry systems reduce fear when installed in private space but their equivalent, such as shutters and security gates, can raise fear in public space. There was an issue of balance, where some security measures were needed to instil reassurance but an excess of security measures in the home was seen as “unwelcoming and depressing.” Sociocultural factors were also at work in the finding that while strong, well-placed lighting boosted confidence in urban settings, dwellers in the countryside felt safe in their domain without expecting or feeling the need for heavy lighting. People also balanced the natural surveillance afforded by clear sight lines and uncluttered street design against feelings of being under observation and were reassured by “a sense of ‘openness’ in the environment” [
Such findings are highly consistent with those reported in the present study and, indeed, quotations extracted from the underlying studies and presented in Lorenc et al.’s review are expressed in closely similar terms to some of those we presented earlier. The underlying cognition supporting this is clearly indicated by Lorenc et al.: “much of the protective effect of familiarity has to do with having strong social networks locally” [
Several of the studies captured in the Lorenc et al. systematic review suggest respondents relating to a broader geographical frame of reference than the neighbourhood level in our own study, an issue we regard as worth fuller exploration, as it has methodological as well as substantive implications. Lorenc et al. also identify an intriguing aspect of the established gender difference in relating to areas of perceived risk or safety, that of “‘vicarious’ fear” [
We would certainly endorse Lorenc et al.’s assessment that “aspects of the physical built environment are clearly relevant to fear to some extent, but fear often relates more directly to the environment’s social meanings than its physical form” [
The research discussed in this paper was conducted under the aegis of the Qualitative Innovations in CAQDAS (QUIC) node of the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) and was supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (Grant no. RES-576-25-0002).