Participatory design of a thematic questionnaire in the field of victimization studies
| Author | Lucrezia Crescenzi Lanna,Spencer Chainey,Riccardo Valente |
| DOI | 10.1177/1477370818769597 |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1477370818769597
European Journal of Criminology
2019, Vol. 16(2) 170 –187
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1477370818769597
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Participatory design of a
thematic questionnaire in the
field of victimization studies
Riccardo Valente
University of Barcelona, Spain
Lucrezia Crescenzi Lanna
Universitat de Vic – Universitat Central de Catalunya, Spain
Spencer Chainey
University College London, UK
Abstract
The paper introduces the results of a two-step process that led to the design of a new questionnaire
in the field of victimization studies. A desk-based review of national Crime and Victimization
Surveys from five EU countries was performed and resulted in identifying opportunities to improve
the consistency among these surveys as well as the need to include more independent variables in
order to measure fear of crime and its correlation with sociological variables. Then 12 experts in
survey-based measures of crime-related issues were involved in a Delphi panel with the objective
of enhancing a participatory design of a new questionnaire addressing individual and space-based
determinants of the perception of insecurity, which has been poorly explored to date.
Keywords
Crime and Victimization Surveys, Delphi method, fear of crime, perception of insecurity
Introduction: Survey-based measures of crime,
victimization and perceived insecurity
Survey-based measures of crime date back to the late 1960s and were developed in order
to offer well-grounded knowledge that could complement administrative records and
Corresponding author:
Riccardo Valente, University of Barcelona, Pg. de la Vall d’Hebrón 171, Edifici Llevant 005, Barcelona, 08035,
Spain.
Email: valente_riccardo@hotmail.it
769597EUC0010.1177/1477370818769597European Journal of CriminologyValente et al.
research-article2018
Article
Valente et al. 171
police statistics. The first survey-based measure was launched in 1965, when former
president of the United States Lyndon Johnson, responding to rising crime, decided to
appoint a Commission with the objective of examining the causes of criminality. At the
time, the only measure of crime available to policymakers was from data on crime
reported to and recorded by law enforcement agencies. Although, according to the con-
clusions of the President’s Commission, ‘police agencies are to some degree dipping
deeper into the vast reservoir of unreported crime’ (President’s Commission on Law
Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, 1967: 40), it was recognized that police
recorded crime was not sufficient alone to determine an accurate assessment of the true
extent of crime. In order to improve the assessment of the extent of crime, the Commission
suggested the implementation of a self-report survey at the national level for collecting
information on people’s experiences of crime and characteristics associated with their
victimization. The proposed survey of crime and victimization was considered to be a
means of helping to improve the accuracy of the true measure of crime by capturing
information that had not been reported to the police, and to improve information that
would help better understand the circumstances that related to victimization.
The first National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) was carried out in the United
States in 1973. By directly asking people about their experiences with crime and compar-
ing this with the level of self-disclosed victimization from police-recorded crime statis-
tics, the ‘dark figure’ of crime was revealed (Boivin and Cordeau, 2011; Messner, 1984;
Skogan, 1974) – the difference between the crimes that actually occur and those that are
reported to the police. The survey also collected information relating to people’s feelings
of safety at home or in the neighbourhood in which they live, fear of being the victim of
a crime, assessment of personal risk to being a victim of crime, worry about criminality
in general, personal wellbeing, and opinions on the effectiveness of the police and the
criminal justice system. The NCVS has become an integral part of crime statistics in the
US and has been carried out on an annual basis since its first edition.
Ever since the introduction of the NCVS in the US, survey-based measures of crime
have become widely adopted in countries in the European Union (for a comprehensive
review, see Aebi and Linde, 2010) and internationally as a way to complement police-
recorded crime data. Although Western industrialized countries are considered to have
led the way in developing and conducting national crime victimization surveys (herein-
after referred to as CVSs), CVSs have also been implemented in African countries
(Nigeria, Rwanda, Egypt, Kenya and South Africa) under the guidance of the United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in Asia (for example, the International Public Safety
Survey in Kyrgyzstan in 2015) and in Latin American and Caribbean countries through
the VICLAC-LACSI initiative (United Nations Economic and Social Council, 2015). In
turn, the adoption of national CVSs has led to attempts to compare results between sur-
veys, with the work of Clinard (1978) being recognized as the first attempt to examine
the viability of comparing CVSs. The International Crime Victim Survey (ICVS) stands
out among other efforts to generate cross-national comparisons and to provide a frame-
work for fully standardized surveys oriented towards the measurement of victimization
experiences (Van Dijk, 2014; Van Dijk et al., 1990).
As argued by Cantor and Lynch (2000: 86), CVSs ‘substantially changed the defini-
tion of crime and the nature of the information available on crime events’. Whereas
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