A Model Design for Determining Social Parameters and Their Importance Regarding Fear of Crime Levels

The concept of fear of crime has frequently been the subject of research on different residential areas and been discussed factually through its emotional, cognitive, and behavioral aspects. The multifaceted nature of the perspectives put forward regarding fear of crime makes singular evaluations limited. However, measuring fear of crime levels is both relative and brings limitations to theoretical evaluation and methodology discussions. Therefore, fear of crime research is significantly affected by parameter determination and model design processes. This study conducts scanning research on the social causes of the fear of crime phenomenon based on the importance of spatial reality in fear of crime research. At the same time, the study proposes a model design with regard to fear of crime measurements. In this way, the study attempts to understand and overcome the limitations restricting the individual evaluations of social phenomena from a sociological perspective. This research examines within its scope the assumptions of fear of crime approaches using the deductive reasoning technique and develops an analysis strategy and sets of variables based on an eclectic framework and social integration theory. The scaling process of the variable sets included in the research is based on a secondary data analysis. The study obtained and analyzed the open-source data on fear of crime and social integration levels from the Directorate General for Criminal Records and Statistics and the Turkish Statistical Institute. The study has been designed operationally based on the quantitative research method. The study identified the phenomenon of fear of crime and the importance of a change levels in its sociological determinants using a canonical correlation analysis based on the correlational research design. As a result of the analysis, the study discovered a change in fear of crime levels to be related to life satisfaction and migration levels. Subjecting settlements to fear of crime research and detailing the results based on thevariables specified on a micro scale are considered useful as these can provide important results in terms of overcoming the research limitations and obtaining valid results.