Fear of Crime on The Gold Coast: Report Writing Assessment Answers

Data The data set was sourced from the 2014 Gold Coast Community Survey, which was a self-administered mail survey designed to examine residents’ fear of crime and to identify factors associated with individuals’ perceptions. There were 300 subjects in total on the following nine variables. The categorical variable, resident’s fear of crime was the response and the independent variables included demographic characteristics (i.e., respondent’s age, gender, income level, and education level), source of news and information about crime on the Gold Coast, and community characteristics (i.e., measures of social cohesion and collective efficacy). Note that participant demographics were in line with the broader Gold Coast population from which the sample was drawn. Methods The IBM SPSS software was used to perform two logistic regression models. The first model regressed resident’s fear of crime (0: not fearful / 1: fearful) on the demographic characteristics of community residents (i.e., respondent’s age, gender, income level, and education level) in order to predict the probability that a person was fearful of crime. And the second model regressed resident’s fear of crime (not fearful / fearful) on the community characteristics (i.e., measures of social cohesion and collective efficacy). The two models can answer the following two research questions, respectively: 1. Are demographic characteristics of community residents related to fear of crime? 2. Are community characteristics related to resident’s fear of crime? The confusion matrix was reported and the accuracy was calculated for each method. To answer the third research question: 3. Is the source of news and information about crime on the Gold Coast related community resident’s fear of crime? The chi-squared test was used in order to examine the relationship between the source of news and information about crime on the Gold Coast and the resident’s fear of crime, and test the null hypotheses that the source of news and information about crime on the Gold Coast and the resident’s fear of crime are independent against the alternative hypotheses that the two variables are not independent. To identify specific differences in the group proportions t-tests were conducted. The null hypothesis for this test is that there is no difference between the two group proportions; against the alternate hypothesis is that the two group proportions are different. For all tests the level of significance alpha was set at 0.05. Results Participants included 300 person (41.67% were not fearful, while 58.33% were fearful of the crime). The sample included 56.67% women and 43.33% men. Frequency and percentage can be found in Table 1. 1. Model 1: Fitting a model containing the main effects of the demographic characteristics of community residents (i.e., respondent’s age, gender, income level, and education level), with fear of crime (not fearful / fearful) as the response. This model has the form: The output of the logistic regression is shown in the table 2: As shown in table 2, The column named Sig. shows that the variables AGE and EDUCATION are significant in the model, since their p-value are lower than 0.05 level of significance, whereas, the variables Gender and Income are not (p-values are greater than 0.05). The column named B, shows that the coefficient of the Respondent’s Age decreases when the age increases. The coefficient of Age 25-54 is -1.74, -2.84 for Age 55-64 class and -3.6 for Age 65+ class, this means that the probability of fear of crime decrease when the respondent’s age increases. Also the coefficient of the respondent’s Highest Year of School Completed increases when the number of highest year of school completed increases. The coefficient of Education Degree is 1.48 and it is 2.03 for Education high degree, which indicates that the probability of fear of crime increase when the respondent’s Highest Year of School Completed increases. 2. Model 2: Fitting a model containing the main effects of the community characteristics (i.e., measures of social cohesion and collective efficacy), with fear of crime (not fearful / fearful) as the response. The column Sig. From the table 4 reveal that all the coefficient of the model 2 are statistically significant at 0.05 level of significance, since the p-value <0.001 for Efficacy and the p-value is less than 0.05 for Cohesion. Further, the coefficient of Moderate Collective Efficacy equals 0.87, and the coefficient of High measure of Collective Efficacy is 1.32, indicate that the probability of fear of crime increase when the measure of collective efficacy increases. Equally, the coefficient of Moderate measure of Social Cohesion equals 0.87, and the coefficient of High measure of Social Cohesion is 1.32, indicate that the probability of fear of crime increases when the measure of Social Cohesion increases. 3. Chi-squared test Thus the test was significant at 0.05 level of significance. Therefore, the null hypotheses should be rejected at 5% level of significance and conclude that Is the source of news and information about crime on the Gold Coast is related community resident’s fear of crime. The analysis found that the Television source and fear of crime comparison is statistically significant whereas, the other sources of news and information about crime on the Gold Coast (i.e. Radio, Print, Internet, Other) are not. Each subscript letter denotes a subset of Primary Source of News and Information categories whose column proportions do not differ significantly from each other at the ,05 level. Conclusion The results found in this study reveal that: - The demographic characteristics of community residents were more related to fear of crime than the community characteristics. - The probability of fear of crime increases when, the respondent’s Highest Year of School Completed increases or the measures of social cohesion and collective efficacy increase. While it decreases by age. There is no relationship between the probability of fear of crime and gender or annual income. - The people used television as sources of news and information about crime on the Gold Coast were more fearful that the people used other sources of news and information about crime on the Gold Coast.