Correlates of unsafety, fear of crime and victimization – A multilevel analysis of 25 years of Swedish safety surveys

• In Event: What happened in Sweden last night? Studies on crime, gender, ethnicity and social class over the last 40 years

Abstract

The WHiS project aims to study immigration, crime and socioeconomics on different levels using both official criminal statistics and alternative sources. This article presents results from multi-level analyses on how different sociodemographic factors (unemployment, education, foreign background etc) correlates with feelings of safety and victimization respectively. The effect of attitudes to local policework and how victimization correlates with feelings of unsafety are also studied. The main questions revolve around differences and similarities (of correlates) between feelings of safety and victimization as well as differences between different measures of feelings of (un)safety. Interactions between correlates are also investigated plus possible differences between three time periods (1998-2007, 2008-2014 and 2015-2023). These analyses are mainly based on a dataset pooling all available local crime surveys carried out by the Swedish police since 1998. So far, the data used contains more than 700 000 observations in 191 municipalities.

Author

• Lars Westfelt, University of Gavle