Assessing the adoption of household safety protection (HSP) in Stockholm, Sweden

This study examines the adoption of household safety protection (HSP) measures in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. Drawing upon assumptions from environmental criminology and situational crime prevention, the study explores the impact of crime and fear of crime on HSP. Geographical Information System (GIS) combines in a single dataset data on HSP adoption: a cross-sectional resident safety survey, socio-demographic statistics of the areas and newspaper vignettes. A pre-analysis of the data is used to check whether HSP adoption varied by tenancy type. Then, hypothesis testing is performed using binary logistic regression models to identify significant predictors of HSP, including individuals’ previous victimization, perception of high crime rates in the neighborhood, declared altruistic fear, and exposure to crime in the local media, while controlling for individual and areal covariates. Protection strategies are found to differ significantly according to tenancy type, and among those who rent, HSP varies by type of housing company. The likelihood of having several types of HSP was found to increase with perception of crime and altruistic fear but to only a small extent, previous victimization.