TY - JOUR AU - Schnell, Rainer AU - Noack, Marcel PY - 2016/12/10 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Reliability and Stability of the Standard Fear of Crime Indicator in a National Panel Over 14 Years JF - Survey Research Methods JA - SRM VL - 10 IS - 3 SE - Articles DO - 10.18148/srm/2016.v10i3.6714 UR - https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/srm/article/view/6714 SP - 253-265 AB - Reducing citizens’ fear of crime is a salient policy topic in Westernsocieties. For the measurement of fear of crime, variations of a singleitem measure (Is there any area near where you live that is, within amile where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?) have beenused in hundreds of surveys for half a century. Despite a long and on-going discussion on the doubtful usefulness of this standard indicator,no estimate for the reliability of this item is available. Using panel datafrom the British Household Panel Survey in combination with the UKHousehold Longitudinal Survey, reliability and stability of the stan-dard fear of crime indicator are estimated using quasi-Markov simplexmodels for the rst time. The model shows estimated reliabilities ofabout .67 for the standard indicator. This result is compared with re-sults for other single item measures using the same data set. Finally,comparisons with reliability recommendations and recent reviews ofsurvey measures are reported. ER -