Testing Elderly People's Fear of Crime Using a Virtual Environment

Abstract

The fear of crime refers to the fear of being a victim of potential crimes. This fear often restricts normal daily activities and lowers the quality of life. For elderly people, fear of crime has a practical effect on their activities. Thus, the study of the fear of crime has been one of the important subjects in the victimization study. However, since there was no common agreement on the definition of the fear of crime among researchers, the methodological issues of measuring the fear of crime have been debated for decades. The methods that are most frequently used in measuring fear of rime are victimization surveys and interviews. These methods have inherent limitations of measuring fear of crime particularly with elderly people. This paper explores a new way of measuring fear of crime using a virtual environment from the behavioural aspects. The case study shows the research experiments with the elderly people who make a choice of routes in the virtual environment that replicates the Vancouver Chinatown. The experimental results suggest that this new method of measuring fear of crime using a virtual environment has many benefits particularly when it is used with elderly people. The limitations of this method and the future research are discussed.