Researching Everyday Emotions: Towards a Multi-Disciplinary Investigation of the Fear of Crime

Abstract

We take an interdisciplinary view on everyday emotions about the risk of crime. We consider a large and rapidly expanding body of psychological research on emotion. This work offers a new conceptual vocabulary, while also addressing pertinent methodological questions concerning research on emotions, placing a significant emphasis on ensuring the ecological and external validity of results. They may thus help us to formulate a more comprehensive picture of what fear of crime actually is as a lived experience. The chapter begins with a short review of the conceptual and methodological problems within the fear of crime literature, before considering the different perspectives on emotion which have emerged more recently. We assess how a multi-disciplinary analysis might facilitate a more theoretically and methodologically robust interpretative framework. Finally, we outline how new methodological techniques employed by researchers studying everyday emotions might be employed to go ‘back to basics,’ to assess what fear of crime measures are actually measuring.

Keywords: fear of crime, everyday emotions, emotional self-report

JEL Classification: K40