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Basic Personal Values, the Country’s Crime Rate and the Fear of Crime

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Abstract

The main aim of this study was to investigate the relations between basic personal values, drawn on Schwartz’s value theory, and the expression of the individual fear of crime by analysing the moderating role of contextual cues (i.e., crime rates). We performed a multinational, multilevel study using the 2008 European Social Survey dataset (N = 53,692, nested in 27 European countries). The fear of crime, which is a generalised insecurity about personal safety, showed a positive association with conservation (i.e., tradition, conformity and security) and a negative association with openness to change (i.e., hedonism, stimulation and self-direction) and self-transcendence values (i.e., benevolence and universalism). With the exception of self-transcendence, all the associations between basic values and the fear of crime were amplified by the country’s crime rate: the higher the crime rate, the stronger the relation between values and the fear of crime. The implications and limitations of these results and possible further research directions are discussed.

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Notes

  1. In the ESS dataset, individual information for respondents living in 29 countries was provided (Belgium, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Spain, Finland, France, the United Kingdom, Greece, Croatia, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Latvia, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, the Russian Federation, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, Turkey and Ukraine). However, we had to exclude participants living in Cyprus and Ukraine because country-level data were not available.

  2. Group mean centring removed all between-country variations in value dimensions. At the conceptual level centring at the group mean yields a pure estimate of the moderating influence that a level-2 predictor exerts on the level-1 association between two variables and cannot be distorted by the presence of an interaction that involves the cluster mean of the independent variable (Enders and Tofighi 2007). That is why Hofmann and Gavin (1998) and Raudenbush (1989) recommended group mean centring when cross-level interactions are of substantive interest, as in our case.

  3. The ESS value scale does not result in clear-cut measurements of the single value types and higher-order value dimensions are definitively more reliable than single value types (e.g., Verkasalo et al. 2009). Moreover, we wanted to include (and control for) all Schwartz’s values in one model of analysis. Models where single value types are used indeed tend to suffer from multicollinearity (e.g., Davidov et al. 2008).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Human Sciences, LUMSA University of Rome, Piazza delle Vaschette, 101, 00193, Rome, Italy

    Daniela Barni

  2. Department of Developmental and Social Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy

    Alessio Vieno

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Turin, Italy

    Michele Roccato

  4. Youth & Society, Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden

    Silvia Russo

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  1. Daniela Barni
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  4. Silvia Russo
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Correspondence to Daniela Barni.

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Barni, D., Vieno, A., Roccato, M. et al. Basic Personal Values, the Country’s Crime Rate and the Fear of Crime. Soc Indic Res 129, 1057–1074 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-015-1161-9

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