Perceptions of Fear of Personal Victimisation: A General Population Study

Hall, Benjamin (2021) Perceptions of Fear of Personal Victimisation: A General Population Study. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

Fear of personal victimisation is a measurement of the self-perceived risk of a person that they will be the victim of law breaking in their daily life. Although there have been many attempts to measure this risk, there are several lacunae within the research field that stem from measurement invariance, temporal inconsistencies and a lack of generalisability (Pleysier, Pauwels, VerVaeke, & Goethals, 2005). This thesis outlines the main lacunae associated with assessment of fear of victimisation and describes a set of innovative studies designed to produce a coherent measurement framework (Mesko, Areh, & Kury, 2004). Specifically, the analysis features an investigation of relationships between key factors of fearfulness. These include; demographics (e.g., gender, age), general perceptions of the local/social environment in the context of crime (e.g., distrusting strangers, fear for self/possessions), how often individuals think about the possibility of becoming a victim of crime, and concern about specific crime types (e.g., mugging) (Mesko et al., 2004). The findings of this paper outline the issues with the “Social and Community Perceptions Scale” and attempt to make improvement to the construct breadth, internal consistency and predictability of fear of personal victimisation (Mesko et al., 2004; van der Wurff, van Staalduinen, & Stringer, 1989). This was accomplished by improving the psychometric properties in an iterative process of item creation and removal following Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to determine the best model fit. The predictability of the scale utilised multiple hierarchical regression to assess the variance of a scale of crimes selected from the Crime Survey of England and Wales (United Kingdom Office for National Statistics, 2016). By the end of phase three, following removal of items sharing excessive variance, analysis confirmed a 4-factor solution. The emergent Fear of Personal Victimisation Scale demonstrated good internal reliability and validity (face and convergent). The measure also displayed the capability to account for more predictability of variance for fear of personal victimisation scores than the original 8-item measure.