Reka Solymosi

• Lecturer at The University of Manchester

PurposeThere is a current need for innovation in research on the fear of crime to move on from general and static representations and instead approach it as a dynamic phenomenon experienced in everyday life, to inform or evaluate situational interventions.Methods This study presents a novel approach to fear of crime research using the framework of...

Background This study examines the impact of the COVID- 19 pandemic on policing, focusing on changes in calls for service and spatial and demographic patterns of demand, and the experiences of call handlers. It explores how policing and community behaviours are adapted under crisis conditions. By examining shifts in demand and police response durin...

There is great importance in understanding whether people perceive an environment as safe or unsafe. Perceptions are influenced by the built environment, and through better understanding, design interventions can be made to improve the feeling of safety. There is a rich body of research on this topic, yet it requires a lot of manual effort. In this...

Public Participation GIS is a widely used method in research, planning, and many other domains. Approaches to participatory data collection have traditionally taken place retrospectively, whereby a digital mapping platform is used for participants to elucidate their spatial through to and feelings. More recently, enabled by the proliferation of sma...

There is great importance in understanding whether people perceive an environment as safe or unsafe. Perceptions are influenced by the built environment, and through better understanding, design interventions can be made to improve the feeling of safety. There is a rich body of research on this topic, yet it requires a lot of manual effort. In this...

Contemporary criminology issues are increasingly global, cross-cultural, and multilingual. Moreover, students from different cultural and national backgrounds will need to apply data analytics in their respective contexts. Crime data used in statistical courses should reflect this diversity, and in turn enhance the equality and inclusivity of the t...

Perceptions of personal security significantly affect human behaviour in geographical environments. The way public places are perceived determines their utilization and their attractiveness among urban residents. Various methods have been applied to study perceptions of security and the environmental factors associated with it. Urban environments c...

The article discusses the growing ethical concern of geodata privacy in geographical research. It highlights the challenges and provides ways for researchers and practitioners to be aware of these issues. We highlight open problems and areas for research, focusing on topics such as appropriate anonymization, responsible data dissemination, and the...

This article presents a discussion of the emerging ethical issue of geodata pri-vacy in geographical research. The paper highlights the importance of consider-ing challenges to privacy when working with geographically explicit data and explores explicit ways in which researchers and practitioners can be conscious of these issues. Through summarisin...

Research and discourse around security covers a diverse range of topics focusing on protecting “people and their assets in particular from mal-intended actions” (Gill 2014: 981), such as crime prevention, management of security, and even discussion about ethics and critiques of security (Gill 2014). In this chapter, we wish to draw attention to per...

The aim of this article is to investigate the nature of information sharing via Twitter by police officers. We examine the content of Tweets in urban and rural contexts using a sample of 20 policerelated Twitter accounts, comparing official and personal accounts active in Southern Sweden. Exploratory data analysis and in-depth content analysis of a...

The aim of this article is to investigate the nature of information sharing via Twitter by police officers. We examine the content of Tweets in urban and rural contexts using a sample of 20 police-related Twitter accounts, comparing official and personal accounts active in Southern Sweden. Exploratory data analysis and in-depth content analysis of...

We explore young people's experiences and perceptions of knife crime, and we compare these to the understanding of police experts, to explore the perceptions shaping trust in the police and policing. We carry out an experience sampling survey deployed using a mobile application reflecting on safety and knife crime, to understand young people's dail...

We explore young people’s experiences and perceptions of knife crime, and we compare these to the understanding of police experts, to explore the perceptions shaping trust in the police and policing. We carry out an experience sampling survey deployed using a mobile application reflecting on safety and knife crime, to understand young people’s dail...

This chapter covers how to measure the strength of the relationship between two ratio-/interval- and two ordinal-level variables. The walk-through starts out by visually examining the bivariate relationship between the two variables of interest using a scatterplot. This is important because it will inform us whether we measure the strength of the r...

In the previous chapter, you learned to compare the means of a numeric variable between two groups. But what if you want to compare a ratio or interval variable between more than two groups? If you are interested in comparing across more than two groups, you cannot run multiple t-tests because it increases the risk of a type I error (mistakenly con...

Many people involved in criminology and criminal justice research spend time making predictions about populations in the real world. These predictions tend to be based on a theoretical framework and are formally stated as hypotheses in order to answer a specific research question. Using inferential statistics (see Chap. 6), we can test to what exte...

In the last chapter, we covered how to use R functions to calculate various measures of central tendency. But while it is certainly useful to know the mean of a given variable you are examining, it is even more helpful if you also know the spread, or dispersion, of cases around this mean. For this chapter, we will focus on measures of dispersion fo...

In many topics within criminology and criminal justice research, we want to draw conclusions from our data that are generalizable to wider populations. These make our findings relevant to the real world, and not specific to any one study or any one dataset. This is where inferential statistics are particularly useful. There are a number of key conc...

This chapter provides an introduction to ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis in R. This is a technique used to explore whether one or multiple variables (the independent variable or X) can predict or explain the variation in another variable (the dependent variable or Y). OLS regression belongs to a family of techniques called generali...

R is a powerful tool for statistical analyses and data visualization that is widely used and increasingly popular in criminology and criminal justice. R is open source—and it’s free! In early 2020, there were over 15,000 available packages, and the number of things that can be done with R grows exponentially every day as users keep adding new packa...

It is probably clear to you now that research in criminal justice is often concerned with making inferences to a population based on a sample statistic. During the course of our research, we may often use tests of statistical significance to determine whether we can safely reject a null hypothesis as being true for our population of interest. But,...

In criminal justice research, we are often interested in comparing the means or proportions in two samples of data, either two different groups, the same group across time (before/after), or two related samples (e.g., comparing twins). In this chapter, we will walk through using the independent sample t-test for two sample means, dependent sample t...

Throughout this book, we have covered various ways of measuring the relationships among variables. We have already discussed tests of statistical significance and how they help us infer differences in a population based on a sample from the population. However, tests of statistical significance do not tell us about the strength of associations amon...

Now that you are familiar with creating data in different formats in R, we can start to discuss one of the most important steps of the data analysis process—transforming your data into what Hadley Wickham (Wickham, Journal of Statistical Software, 59(10), 1–23, 2014) calls tidy data. Fittingly, many useful functions for data tidying are in a set of...

This chapter covers some basic and commonly used methods of describing your data, including calculating measures of central tendency. When we talk about measures of central tendency, we are referring to cases that fall in the middle of a distribution. In other words, we can think of these as being the typical or average case. Measures of central te...

In this chapter, we focus on characteristics of the normal distribution and single-sample significance tests that are used for variables measured at the ratio and interval levels. Specifically, this chapter reviews percentages under the normal curve, application of the 68-95-99.7 rule, and how to conduct a significance test in R for the following:...

Are you sick of those drab-looking graphs and plots in Stata and SPSS? We are too! So, this chapter covers data visualization in R. Specifically, you will be working with ggplot2, a package within the tidyverse set of packages, for making high-quality, reproducible graphics. Data visualization is an accessible, aesthetically pleasing, and powerful...

This chapter introduces methods to explore the relationship between two categorical variables (either measured at the nominal or ordinal levels) using the British Crime Survey data. We will cover how to tabulate and visualize this kind of relationships using a two-way contingency table (also referred to as cross tabulation or cross tabs), but also...

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, police services around the world were granted unprecedented new powers to enforce social distancing restrictions to help to get the virus under control. Using data from a representative survey of Londoners fielded during the height of the first wave of the pandemic (April – June 2020), we explore the scale of p...

Worry about COVID-19 is a central topic of research into the social and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we present a new way of measuring worry about catching COVID-19 that distinguishes between worry as a negative experience that damages people’s quality of life (dysfunctional) and worry as an adaptive experience tha...

This book provides hands-on guidance for researchers and practitioners in criminal justice and criminology to perform statistical analyses and data visualization in the free and open-source software, R. It offers a step-by-step guide for beginners to become familiar with the RStudio platform. This volume will help users master the fundamentals of t...

Open and crowdsourced data are becoming prominent in social sciences research. Crowdsourcing projects harness information from large numbers of citizens who voluntarily participate in one collaborative project, and allow new insights into people's attitudes and perceptions. However, these data may be affected by a series of biases that limit their...

Crowdsourcing refers to the practise of enlisting the knowledge, experience or skills of a large number of people (the crowd) through some digital platform to collect data towards a collaborative project. Crowdsourcing can generate large volumes of data in relatively little time at a very small cost, and can be useful for research, strategic police...

Few researches have considered fear of crime as a context-specific experience. This article promotes a place-based theoretical framework for studying crime perceptions through presenting app-based and crowdsourcing measures of perception of crime and place as a robust methodological framework. A systematic review of published studies that use crowd...

Police agencies globally are seeing an increase in reports of people going missing. These people are often vulnerable, and their safe and early return is a key factor in preventing them from coming to serious harm. One approach to quickly find missing people is to disseminate appeals for information using social media. Yet despite the popularity of...

Civic technologies levy advances in digital tools to promote civic engagement, giving people a voice to participate in public decision-making. While democratizing participation, the use of such civic tech also leaves behind a digital trace of the behavior of its users. This article uses such a digital trace to explore spatial patterns in active gua...

Tackling unwanted sexual behaviour (USB) on public transport is a concern for transit authorities across the world. However, high rates of underreporting mean a lack of reliable information about USB, presenting a key barrier to prevention. This paper presents a realist evaluation of an initiative called ‘Report It To Stop It’ (RITSI) implemented i...

Ensuring passenger security on mass transit is vital for modern cities. Failure to do so may jeopardize the societal, environmental and health benefits of public transportation. One challenge with securing transit environments comes from the difficulty of accurately estimating the risk of criminal victimization at various nodes, particularly with r...

New forms of data are now widely used in social sciences, and much debate surrounds their ideal application to the study of crime problems. Limitations associated with this data, including the subjective bias in reporting are often a point of this debate. In this article, we argue that by re-conceptualizing such data and focusing on their mode of p...

To advance and widen the scope of research into the perception of crime and place, innovations in technology for data collection can be utilized as research tools. To date, there has been little exploration into these new methods of data capture. This thesis presents the possibilities of using crowdsourced data collection methods for application to...

As demonstrated throughout this book, the risk of certain types of crime can increase in congested spaces. Contact crimes, crimes which require the offender to make physical contact with the victim, are especially common in more crowded transport networks and can discourage many would-be passengers (Brand and Price, 2000). Pickpocketing makes up a...