This article presents the quantitative findings from a mixed-method study of perceptions of crime in inner Sydney. A survey was deployed via Computer-Assisted Telephone Interview on a randomly selected sample of the inner Sydney population (n = 409). We find that less than half of the participants worry about crime but that a sizable minority (13%) indicated that they have some worry about a category of crime every week of the year or more. Building on a recent conceptual advance, we differentiate between functional and dysfunctional fear of crime. We find that greater direct and indirect experience of victimisation, believing one’s neighbourhood to be disorderly, and believing that collective efficacy is low, all predict moving up the scale from no worry, to functional fear, to increasingly frequent dysfunctional fear. The findings suggest gender and age are largely unrelated to worry about crime, controlling for perceptions of community disorder, perceptions of collective efficacy, direct victimisation experience and indirect victimisation experience. We conclude with some thoughts on the role of environmental cues in shifting people’s functional response to perceived risk to dysfunctional patterning of emotions in people’s daily lives.

中文翻译：

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悉尼内城区对犯罪的功能性和功能性恐惧：混合方法研究的定量部分的结果

本文介绍了对悉尼内城区犯罪认知的混合方法研究的定量结果。通过计算机辅助电话访谈对随机选择的悉尼内城区人口样本（n = 409）进行了一项调查。我们发现只有不到一半的参与者担心犯罪，但相当多的少数人 (13%) 表示他们一年中每周或更长时间都对某类犯罪感到担忧。基于最近的概念进步，我们区分了功能性和功能性对犯罪的恐惧。我们发现，更多的直接和间接受害经历、认为自己的邻居无序以及认为集体效率低下，都预示着从无忧无虑到功能性恐惧，再到越来越频繁的功能障碍恐惧。研究结果表明，性别和年龄在很大程度上与担心犯罪、控制对社区混乱的看法、集体效能的看法、直接受害经历和间接受害经历无关。最后，我们对环境线索在改变人们对感知风险的功能反应中的作用进行了一些思考，这些反应是人们日常生活中情绪失调的模式。