Keeping trouble at a safe distance

The fear of crime is widely accepted as social problem across the globe. But we don’t have a valid picture of it. Taking a social psychological approach, we search for suitable explanations to this highly complex allocation of interacting perceptions. The goal was to find out at what level of psychological distance citizens primarily experience ‘the fear of crime’ and how they construct it.

This research utilized a broad range of both qualitative and quantitative techniques, such as historical discourse analysis, free associative interviewing, sorting of photo’s through Q-methodology and Structural Equation Modelling. The results show that citizens are highly motivated to keep the trouble of crime at a safe distance. Even to those who assess crime to be a highly significant risk outside one’s own front door, ‘the fear of crime’ is a distant and abstract social problem.

Keeping trouble at a safe distance relates to the broad field of the social sciences, especially to the disciplines of criminology, sociology and social psychology.