Mapping fear of crime: defining methodological orientations

For an exhaustive review of the literature, see Solymosi et al. 2020 and Vanderveen 2018.

The Paris area (or Île-de-France) is the area in France that includes Paris and seven other neighboring départements (Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis, Seine-et-Marne, Essonne, Yvelines Val de Marne and the Val d’Oise). With 12 million Inhabitants (known as franciliens), it is the most densely populated region of France. It represents 19% of the French population.

Formerly the Institut d’Aménagement et d’urbanisme (IAU). The Paris Region Institute is the design office of the Île-de-France region.

Formerly Stif. Île-de-france Mobilités is the authority in charge of organizing public transportation in the Île-de-France region.

The annual Navigo pass is a subscription for unlimited use of all public transportation in the Île-de-France region.

The Imagine R Navigo is a service similar to the annual Navigo pass but it is open only to high school and college students under 25 years of age.

A protocol for sending reminders was set up in order to improve the response rate. Ten days after the first mailing (September 19–27, 2019), those people who had not login to the questionnaire received a reminder between the 7^th and the 10^th of October.

This is not a representative sample of the target population. When a survey is conducted on a non-probabilistic sample, the invitations to respond to the questionnaire are sent to as many individuals as possible, with no prior selection of participants, aside from the fact that they belong to the target group. The consequence of this self-selection of respondents is the introduction of two main population biases, now well identified by methodological research. The first is the overrepresentation, within the sample, of respondents who feel concerned by the theme broached (Shropshire et al. 2009). In the present survey, there are proportionally more individuals who claimed to have worried about theft or physical assault in public transportation than in the Île-de-France victimization survey (63% of respondents versus 40.9% in the Victimization and fear of crime in Île-de-France survey. The second bias is the underrepresentation of some categories of the population, especially those with the fewest diplomas (identified here using socioprofessional categories). The lower the educational level, the more the group involved is underrepresented (Frippat & Marquis; 2010; Loosveldt and Sonck 2008). The consequence of the latter bias is shown in Table 2, appended.

That question was put only to respondents who had previously claimed to have had their latest experience of fear in a bus. The results presented below are taken from the main survey carried out in 2019.

All of the names correspond to names of bus stops.

This results are taken from the main survey carried out in 2019.

During the last 12 months, have you ever felt worried about being the victim of a theft or physical assault on public transportation?

This solution is proposed for the measurement of the intensity of the fear of crime. To those respondents who claimed to have felt worried at least once during the past 12 months, Farrall and his colleagues put the following question: “on the last occasion you felt worried about [that problem], how worried did you feel ?”.

Several threatening experiences may be recorded provided the same set of questions is repeated as often as necessary so as to document each experience separately.

This solution is appropriate for fear of crime in public transportation, but it may be applied to other, broader contexts. It is possible to provide other forms, usable for studying fear in a neighborhood, inasmuch as people necessarily travel within it (to go to work or school, to shop, for sports or cultural activities, etc.).

The name of night buses in the Paris area.

While experience sampling is the only methodological alternative discussed in the present text, it is important to make it clear that many other methods exist. The space–time budget method developed by Wilkstrom (2012) is one of them. This technique involves questioning respondents retrospectively on their activities, hour by hour, during the last 4 days. This presents the advantage of accurately showing the spatial and temporal context and the duration of each day-to-day activity, while reducing problems linked to recall. However, the temporal limit of 4 days is far too short to allow us to deal with less frequent occurrences, such as fear of crime (Farrall et al. 2009).

The Overall transportation survey (Enquête Globale Transport, or EGT), conducted by Île-de-France Mobilités, collects information on how individual franciliens travel, the types of transportation used, the reasons for travel and duration of their journeys. Five EGTs have been conducted since 1976 (1976, 1983, 1991, 2001 and 2010). The latest edition, conducted in 2010, questioned 18,000 households, representing 43,000 individuals, a representative sample of the population of the region. This survey has the advantage of requesting whether the person has a subscription to the public transportation system, which makes it possible to clarify the social and demographic profile of that specific group (age, sex, occupation, socio-professional category, département of residence). The SPC is the variable whose distribution shows the greatest differences between the two samples. Executives and higher intellectual professions are twice as frequent in the ESITP than in the target population (furthermore, they represent the groups with the highest educational level). Conversely, and in the same proportions, employees and middle management professions (less educated than the former group) are underrepresented in the survey. Last, there are almost one-sixth as many workers (still less educated) in the ESITP sample