Please find details below of this week's meeting of the Royal
Statistical Society Cumbria and Lancashire Local Group.
Best wishes
Matt
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Do neighbourhoods matter? Exploring the impact of the local
environmental character on individual assessments of fear of crime.
Ian Brunton-Smith, Lecturer in Criminology and Statistics, University of
Surrey.
* Thursday, 20th January at 16.00 -17.00 in the Postgraduate
Statistics Centre Lecture Theatre, Lancaster University
Tea at 15.30 on the first floor before the meeting.
Criminologists have long contended that neighbourhoods matter to
individual assessments of fear of crime, with people drawing on
environmental cues from the local area when judging their own risks of
victimisation. Yet, despite the theoretical importance and
policy-relevance of these claims, the empirical evidence-base is
surprisingly thin and inconsistent. Linking three years of data from the
British Crime Survey to geo-locational data from the 2001 census about
the environmental character of local neighbourhoods, we use multilevel
models to examine the importance of neighbourhoods across the whole of
England. Our findings demonstrate that structural characteristics of
local areas, visual signs of low level disorder, and levels of recorded
crime all impact on individual assessments of fear. Crucially, these
environmental characteristics are also shown to both exacerbate and
ameliorate between group differences in expressed fear of crime, with
more vulnerable residents most likely to base their assessment on the
structural character of the local area. We conclude with a more complex
treatment of the differing ways that individuals variously experience
'neighbourhoods', testing the extent of 'spatial autocorrelation' and
exploring whether residents might also be influenced by the crime and
disorder profiles of surrounding areas (often referred to as spillover
effects).
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