The Feeling of Crime: The Fear of Crime Effect on the UK University Students Quality of life

Brief Project Summary

This study is to explore the fear of crime impact on UK university students quality of life. It is trying to find out the differences between the local students and the international students on the level of quality of life, the level of worry about being a victim in the crime, the feelings of crime and the ways for the students to respond on the effects. The quality of life is to determine what is important to a persons well-being, is not just the absence of disease or illness. The World Health Organization defined the term of quality of life (QOL) is the degree of need, expectation, concerns and satisfaction within the physical, psychological, social, activity, material, and structural (WHO, 2019). A survey method was adopted using a modified version of the World Health Organization Quality of Life-100 questionnaire to investigate the effect, the level of worry about being a victim in the crime, the feelings of crime and the ways for the students to respond on the effects. In this research will focus on the top 3 common crimes in the UK, they are burglary, robbery and violence. Because there was a higher rate in burglary, robbery and violence for students than other population in the UK (Rust, Somerville, Cole and Brown, 2001; Devereux and Buchanan, 2001; Hopkins and Burke, 2001; Chalcraft and Wilson, 2001). The participants in this study will be asked to answer their feeling in crime, fear or not fear the upon crimes when those crimes happened in the community. A lot of academics were struggling on defining fear of crime, and they found that the people were more likely to describe their feelings about crime in terms of anger and shock than fear (Christmann and Rogerson, 2004). According to previous research, they collected data from two universities and provided the results after a half year. This study will focus on one university only, therefore it needs around 3 months to collect and analyse the data. (Barberet, et al. 2003).

Fear of crime emerges as a social phenomenon (Austin et al., 2002). According to the previous research, the university students are identified as a specific victim group(Home office 2009a). The past literatures investigated the effect of the fear of crime on the UK students quality of life (as well as social well-being). They forced on the difference the effect of the fear of crime on victims and non-victims or gender differences. In their results, they found a majority of participants suffered psychological negative effects from the fear of crime. (Christmann and Rogerson 2004, Morrall, et al. 2010, Dinisman and Moroz 2017). Studies that investigate the effect on the international students who are studying in the UK are lacking. UK is one of the world’s leading destinations for international students, second only to the USA. UK universities are among the best in the world, and consistently perform well in world rankings. Base on that reasoning, theres a lots of international students choose studying in the UK.
This study will examine and compare the fear of crime affect quality of life level among local students and international students in Coventry University
Specific research questions include the following:
What are the effects of fear of crime on UK university students'(local and international students) quality of life (specifically, physical and psychological well-being?
What are the differences between fear of crime and non-fear of crime on UK university students?
What are the differences between local and international students?