Ian Brunton-Smith
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 224683 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Ian Brunton-Smith |
| NOMBRES | Ian |
| APELLIDO | Brunton-Smith |
| FIRMA | BRUNTON-SMITH I |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Surrey |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0077-5602 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 38 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 479 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 38 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2007 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
How does hate hurt more? National evidence for the varying emotional impacts of hate crime
The last 20 years have witnessed a growth in the recognition of the profound negative impacts of hate crime. As a result, many criminal justice systems have adopted sentencing approaches that hold the perpetrator accountable for the additional harm these offences cause to victims. While this added sentencing penalty may be supported through a retributive lens, and the wider ‘signalling’ element of these offences, there is comparatively little rob…
Understanding public confidence in the police within democratic and authoritarian regimes
Studies of public confidence in the police have enabled important insights into the factors responsible for achieving public support. Empirically tested in overwhelmingly democratic nations, there remain questions about the generalizability of this work to different types of political regimes, especially authoritarian nations. Using Wave 7 of the World Values Survey ( n = 38,838) we assess whether predictors of police confidence operate in simila…
Attitudes towards the death penalty
Research on public attitudes to the death penalty has been predominantly understood through single nation-states, especially within the USA. Examinations of international differences in citizens’ support for the death penalty have been scarce, particularly among continents with a high volume of retentionist nations (e.g. Asia). In this paper, we draw on a dataset of 135,000 people from across 81 nations to examine differences in death penalty sup…
Estimating the Reliability of Crime Data in Geographic Areas
Crime data are problematic: Crimes that are never reported undermine its validity and differences in police recording practices affect its reliability. However, the true extent of these problems is not well known, with existing studies suffering from a number of methodological limitations. We examine the quality of police recorded crime data and survey-based crime estimates recorded in England and Wales using a robust latent trait model that effe…
Police visibility, trust in police fairness, and collective efficacy
Areas high in collective efficacy – where residents know and trust one another and are willing to intervene to solve neighbourhood problems – tend to experience less crime. Policing is thought to be one antecedent to collective efficacy, but little empirical research has explored this question. Using three waves of survey data collected from London residents over three consecutive years, and multilevel Structural Equation Modelling, this study te…
The Impact of Measurement Error in Regression Models Using Police Recorded Crime Rates
Personality and Survey Satisficing
In this paper, we consider the role of personality as a component of motivation in promoting or inhibiting the tendency to exhibit the satisficing response styles of midpoint, straightlining, and Don’t Know responding. We assess whether respondents who are low on the Conscientiousness and Agreeableness dimensions of the Big Five Personality Inventory are more likely to exhibit these satisficing response styles. We find large effects of these pers…
Prevalence of sexual violence
Accurately measuring the prevalence of sexual violence is difficult. Police-recorded crime figures are known to underestimate the true extent of sexual violence, and so researchers have tended to rely on survey estimates instead. But estimates from surveys are not uniform, with recent estimates from the UK National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles apparently twice as large as official figures from the major crime surveys (the Crime Surve…
Estimating Crime in Place
We assess if asking victims about the places where crimes happen leads to estimates of “crime in place” with better measurement properties. We analyze data from the Barcelona Victimization Survey (2015–2020) aggregated in 73 neighborhoods using longitudinal quasi-simplex models and criterion validity to estimate the quality of four types of survey-based measures of crime. The distribution of survey-based offense location estimates, as opposed to …
Comparing measurements of violent crime in local communities
Police-recorded crime data are prone to measurement error, affecting our understanding of the nature of crime. Research has responded to this problem using data from surveys and emergency services. These data sources are not error-free, and data from different sources are not always easily comparable. This study compares violent crime data recorded by police, ambulance services, two surveys and computer simulations in Islington, London. Different…
Inequalities in recovery or methodological artefact? A comparison of models across physical and mental health functioning
Considerable attention has been paid to inequalities in health. More recently, focus has also turned to inequalities in 'recovery'; with research, for example, suggesting that lower grade of employment is strongly associated with slower recovery from both poor physical and poor mental health. However, this research has tended to operationalise recovery as 'return to baseline', and we know less about patterns and predictors when recovery is situat…
Police Legitimacy and the Norm to Cooperate
The effects of terrorist incidents on public worry of future attacks, views of the police and social cohesion
Despite a growing body of research examining the psychological effects of terrorist incidents, there remains comparatively little empirical assessment of their impacts on citizens’ worry about further attacks, perceptions of the police or social cohesion. Drawing on interviews with nearly 100,000 London residents, we find higher levels of worry following most domestic attacks. Improvements in overall ratings of the police are tempered by more neg…
Trust in science, social consensus and vaccine confidence
Reassessing the relationship between procedural justice and police legitimacy
OBJECTIVE: A large body of cross-sectional research has identified a positive relationship between perceptions of police procedural justice and legitimacy. Following Tyler's theoretical framework, studies have often interpreted the observed relationship as evidence of an unequivocal causal connection from procedural justice to legitimacy. Here we reexamined the validity of this conclusion by considering the temporal order of that association and …
Re-assessing the Consistency of Sentencing Decisions in Cases of Assault
Empirical research has repeatedly focused on the potential existence of sentencing disparities. In particular, a growing number of studies have used multilevel models to quantify the extent that ‘similar’ offences are treated alike in different courts. This reliance on multilevel models has resulted in a natural focus on differences in the mean sentence awarded between courts, with the amount of within-group variability generally assumed to be th…
Depression, anxiety and delinquency
The main aim of this research is to investigate to what extent within-individual changes in anxiety and depression are related to within-individual changes in theft and violence. The youngest sample of the Pittsburgh Youth Study (PYS), a prospective longitudinal survey of 503 boys followed up from age 7 onwards, was analyzed. Depression and anxiety were measured for boys from ages 11 to 16 as were moderate and serious forms of self-reported theft…
Patterns and Drivers of Co-production in Neighbourhood Watch in England and Wales
Established in England and Wales in the context of the neo-liberal governments of the 1980s and promoted through the New Local agenda of New Labour and beyond, Neighborhood Watch (NW) is a primary means through which the state and citizens may co-produce crime control. However, whether citizens have the time or inclination to co-produce is debated and it is generally believed that NW proliferates in advantaged, low crime rate areas that need it l…
Exploring the origin of sentencing disparities in the Crown Court
Systematic Social Observation
Systematic social observation (SSO) is the application of rigorous, replicable, and generalizable approaches from survey methodology to field observation (ethnography). SSO provides researchers with independent, robust, and quantifiable data about the forms of social interactions most commonly obtained through qualitative inquiry. This chapter begins with a general overview of the SSO approach. Section 14.3 describes the application of SSO approa…
Mind the step
The ‘England and Wales Sentencing Guidelines’ aim to promote consistency by organizing the sentencing process as a sequence of steps, with initial judicial assessments subsequently adjusted to reflect relevant case characteristics. Yet, existing evaluations of the guidelines have failed to incorporate this structure adequately, instead concentrating solely on sentence outcomes. We use multivariate multilevel models to offer new insights into the …
Crime-general and crime-specific spatial patterns
How Collective Is Collective Efficacy? The Importance of Consensus in Judgments About Community Cohesion and Willingness to Intervene
Existing studies have generally measured collective efficacy by combining survey respondents’ ratings of their local area into an overall summary for each neighborhood. Naturally, this approach results in a substantive focus on the variation in average levels of collective efficacy between neighborhoods. In this article, we focus on the variation in consensus of collective efficacy judgments. To account for differential consensus among neighborho…
The Falling Carbon Footprint of Acquisitive and Violent Offences
Cutting carbon emissions, wherever they occur, is a global priority and those associated with crime are no exception. We show that between 1995 and 2015, the carbon footprint of acquisitive and violent crime has dropped by 62 per cent, a total reduction of 54 million tonnes CO2e throughout this period. Although the environmental harm associated with crime is likely to be considered lower in importance than social or economic impacts, a focus on r…
Addressing the Carbon‐Crime Blind Spot
Governments estimate the social and economic impacts of crime, but its environmental impact is largely unacknowledged. Our study addresses this by estimating the carbon footprint of crime in England and Wales and identifies the largest sources of emissions. By applying environmentally extended input‐output analysis–derived carbon emission factors to the monetized costs of crime, we estimate that crime committed in 2011 in England and Wales gave r…
Does Ethnic Diversity Erode Trust? Putnam’s ‘Hunkering Down’ Thesis Reconsidered
We use a multi-level modelling approach to estimate the effect of ethnic diversity on measures of generalized and strategic trust using data from a new survey in Britain with a sample size approaching 25,000 individuals. In addition to the ethnic diversity of neighbourhoods, we incorporate a range of indicators of the socio-economic characteristics of individuals and the areas in which they live. Our results show no effect of ethnic diversity on …
Do Neighborhoods Generate Fear of Crime? An Empirical Test Using the British Crime Survey
For a long time, criminologists have contended that neighborhoods are important determinants of how individuals perceive their risk of criminal victimization. Yet, despite the theoretical importance and policy relevance of these claims, the empirical evidence base is surprisingly thin and inconsistent. Drawing on data from a national probability sample of individuals, linked to independent measures of neighborhood demographic characteristics, vis…
Ethnic diversity, segregation and the social cohesion of neighbourhoods in London
The question of whether and how ethnic diversity affects the social cohesion of communities has become an increasingly prominent and contested topic of academic and political debate. In this paper we focus on a single city: London. As possibly the most ethnically diverse conurbation on the planet, London serves as a particularly suitable test-bed for theories about the effects of ethnic heterogeneity on prosocial attitudes. We find neighbourhood …
Political and Civic Engagement and Participation
This article presents an overview of current understandings in the study of political and civic engagement and participation, drawing in particular on innovations which have emerged from the Processes Influencing Democratic Ownership and Participation (PIDOP) project. For the purposes of the article, ‘engagement’ is defined as having an interest in, paying attention to, or having knowledge, beliefs, opinions, attitudes, or feelings about either p…
Collective Efficacy, Deprivation and Violence in London
This paper examines the importance of neighbourhood context in explaining violence in London. Exploring in a new context Sampson’s work on the relationship between interdependent spatial patterns of concentrated disadvantage and crime, we assess whether collective efficacy (i.e. shared expectations about norms, values and goals, as well as the ability of members of the community to realize these goals) mediates the potential impact on violence of…
Bridging Structure and Perception
Applying Robert Sampson’s (2012) work on interdependent spatial patterns in a new setting, we link structural characteristics of the neighbourhood to public beliefs and worries about neighbourhood violence via two intermediate mechanisms: (1) collective efficacy and (2) neighbourhood disorder. Analysing data from face-to-face interviews of 61,436 individuals living in 4,761 London neighbourhoods, we find that the strength of informal social contr…
Untangling the Relationship Between Fear of Crime and Perceptions of Disorder
Over the last 40 years and more, a growing number of researchers have explored the links between perceptions of disorder and fear of criminal victimization. Many of these studies have posited a causal link from perceptions of disorder to subsequent fear, with disorderly cues in the environment signalling to individuals that an area is in decline and unable to control deviant behaviour. But a growing body of evidence approaches this question from …
Trust in science, social consensus and vaccine confidence
How Collective Is Collective Efficacy? The Importance of Consensus in Judgments About Community Cohesion and Willingness to Intervene
Existing studies have generally measured collective efficacy by combining survey respondents’ ratings of their local area into an overall summary for each neighborhood. Naturally, this approach results in a substantive focus on the variation in average levels of collective efficacy between neighborhoods. In this article, we focus on the variation in consensus of collective efficacy judgments. To account for differential consensus among neighborho…
Mind the step
The ‘England and Wales Sentencing Guidelines’ aim to promote consistency by organizing the sentencing process as a sequence of steps, with initial judicial assessments subsequently adjusted to reflect relevant case characteristics. Yet, existing evaluations of the guidelines have failed to incorporate this structure adequately, instead concentrating solely on sentence outcomes. We use multivariate multilevel models to offer new insights into the …
Fieldwork Effort, Response Rate, and the Distribution of Survey Outcomes
This study assesses how survey outcome distributions change over repeated calls made to addresses in face-to-face household interview surveys. We consider this question for 541 survey variables, drawn from six major face-to-face UK surveys that have different sample designs, cover different topic areas, and achieve response rates between 54 and 76 percent. Using a multilevel meta-analytic framework, we estimate for each survey variable the expect…
Depression, anxiety and delinquency
The main aim of this research is to investigate to what extent within-individual changes in anxiety and depression are related to within-individual changes in theft and violence. The youngest sample of the Pittsburgh Youth Study (PYS), a prospective longitudinal survey of 503 boys followed up from age 7 onwards, was analyzed. Depression and anxiety were measured for boys from ages 11 to 16 as were moderate and serious forms of self-reported theft…
Is Success in Obtaining Contact and Cooperation Correlated With the Magnitude of Interviewer Variance
Evidence is now beginning to accumulate that shows that interviewer attitudes, personality, and behavior are predictive of success in achieving contact and cooperation with sampled households. A less frequently explored possibility, however, is that these same characteristics might also be the source of variability in the extent to which interviewers follow best practices in the implementation of standardized interviewing. That is to say, there m…
Re-assessing the Consistency of Sentencing Decisions in Cases of Assault
Empirical research has repeatedly focused on the potential existence of sentencing disparities. In particular, a growing number of studies have used multilevel models to quantify the extent that ‘similar’ offences are treated alike in different courts. This reliance on multilevel models has resulted in a natural focus on differences in the mean sentence awarded between courts, with the amount of within-group variability generally assumed to be th…
Patterns and Drivers of Co-production in Neighbourhood Watch in England and Wales
Established in England and Wales in the context of the neo-liberal governments of the 1980s and promoted through the New Local agenda of New Labour and beyond, Neighborhood Watch (NW) is a primary means through which the state and citizens may co-produce crime control. However, whether citizens have the time or inclination to co-produce is debated and it is generally believed that NW proliferates in advantaged, low crime rate areas that need it l…
Exploring the origin of sentencing disparities in the Crown Court
Crime-general and crime-specific spatial patterns
Estimating the Reliability of Crime Data in Geographic Areas
Crime data are problematic: Crimes that are never reported undermine its validity and differences in police recording practices affect its reliability. However, the true extent of these problems is not well known, with existing studies suffering from a number of methodological limitations. We examine the quality of police recorded crime data and survey-based crime estimates recorded in England and Wales using a robust latent trait model that effe…
The effects of terrorist incidents on public worry of future attacks, views of the police and social cohesion
Despite a growing body of research examining the psychological effects of terrorist incidents, there remains comparatively little empirical assessment of their impacts on citizens’ worry about further attacks, perceptions of the police or social cohesion. Drawing on interviews with nearly 100,000 London residents, we find higher levels of worry following most domestic attacks. Improvements in overall ratings of the police are tempered by more neg…
Science knowledge and attitudes across cultures
The correlation between knowledge and attitudes has been the source of controversy in research on the public understanding of science (PUS). Although many studies, both quantitative and qualitative, have examined this issue, the results are at best diverse and at worst contradictory. In this paper, we review the evidence on the relationship between public attitudes and public knowledge about science across 40 countries using a meta-analytic appro…
Public attitudes to genomic science
We use an experimental panel study design to investigate the effect of providing “value-neutral” information about genomic science in the form of a short film to a random sample of the British public. We find little evidence of attitude change as a function of information provision. However, our results show that information provision significantly increased dropout from the study amongst less educated respondents. Our findings have implications …
Do Neighborhoods Generate Fear of Crime? An Empirical Test Using the British Crime Survey
For a long time, criminologists have contended that neighborhoods are important determinants of how individuals perceive their risk of criminal victimization. Yet, despite the theoretical importance and policy relevance of these claims, the empirical evidence base is surprisingly thin and inconsistent. Drawing on data from a national probability sample of individuals, linked to independent measures of neighborhood demographic characteristics, vis…
Untangling the Relationship Between Fear of Crime and Perceptions of Disorder
Over the last 40 years and more, a growing number of researchers have explored the links between perceptions of disorder and fear of criminal victimization. Many of these studies have posited a causal link from perceptions of disorder to subsequent fear, with disorderly cues in the environment signalling to individuals that an area is in decline and unable to control deviant behaviour. But a growing body of evidence approaches this question from …
Does Ethnic Diversity Erode Trust? Putnam’s ‘Hunkering Down’ Thesis Reconsidered
We use a multi-level modelling approach to estimate the effect of ethnic diversity on measures of generalized and strategic trust using data from a new survey in Britain with a sample size approaching 25,000 individuals. In addition to the ethnic diversity of neighbourhoods, we incorporate a range of indicators of the socio-economic characteristics of individuals and the areas in which they live. Our results show no effect of ethnic diversity on …
Is Success in Obtaining Contact and Cooperation Correlated With the Magnitude of Interviewer Variance
Evidence is now beginning to accumulate that shows that interviewer attitudes, personality, and behavior are predictive of success in achieving contact and cooperation with sampled households. A less frequently explored possibility, however, is that these same characteristics might also be the source of variability in the extent to which interviewers follow best practices in the implementation of standardized interviewing. That is to say, there m…
Collective Efficacy, Deprivation and Violence in London
This paper examines the importance of neighbourhood context in explaining violence in London. Exploring in a new context Sampson’s work on the relationship between interdependent spatial patterns of concentrated disadvantage and crime, we assess whether collective efficacy (i.e. shared expectations about norms, values and goals, as well as the ability of members of the community to realize these goals) mediates the potential impact on violence of…
Political and Civic Engagement and Participation
This article presents an overview of current understandings in the study of political and civic engagement and participation, drawing in particular on innovations which have emerged from the Processes Influencing Democratic Ownership and Participation (PIDOP) project. For the purposes of the article, ‘engagement’ is defined as having an interest in, paying attention to, or having knowledge, beliefs, opinions, attitudes, or feelings about either p…
Bridging Structure and Perception
Applying Robert Sampson’s (2012) work on interdependent spatial patterns in a new setting, we link structural characteristics of the neighbourhood to public beliefs and worries about neighbourhood violence via two intermediate mechanisms: (1) collective efficacy and (2) neighbourhood disorder. Analysing data from face-to-face interviews of 61,436 individuals living in 4,761 London neighbourhoods, we find that the strength of informal social contr…
Ethnic diversity, segregation and the social cohesion of neighbourhoods in London
The question of whether and how ethnic diversity affects the social cohesion of communities has become an increasingly prominent and contested topic of academic and political debate. In this paper we focus on a single city: London. As possibly the most ethnically diverse conurbation on the planet, London serves as a particularly suitable test-bed for theories about the effects of ethnic heterogeneity on prosocial attitudes. We find neighbourhood …
The Effects of Prisoner Attachment to Family on Re-entry Outcomes
Strong family support networks are regularly identified in the search for effective inhibitors of criminal behaviour but have rarely been empirically examined in the context of the prison population. Furthermore, we know little about the factors that may weaken or indeed enhance these bonds during a prison sentence. Using data from a longitudinal survey of male prisoners in England and Wales, we address this deficit. We show that visits from pare…
Fieldwork Effort, Response Rate, and the Distribution of Survey Outcomes
This study assesses how survey outcome distributions change over repeated calls made to addresses in face-to-face household interview surveys. We consider this question for 541 survey variables, drawn from six major face-to-face UK surveys that have different sample designs, cover different topic areas, and achieve response rates between 54 and 76 percent. Using a multilevel meta-analytic framework, we estimate for each survey variable the expect…
Addressing the Carbon‐Crime Blind Spot
Governments estimate the social and economic impacts of crime, but its environmental impact is largely unacknowledged. Our study addresses this by estimating the carbon footprint of crime in England and Wales and identifies the largest sources of emissions. By applying environmentally extended input‐output analysis–derived carbon emission factors to the monetized costs of crime, we estimate that crime committed in 2011 in England and Wales gave r…
Harnessing paradata and multilevel multiple imputation when analysing survey data
Missing data (attrition and non-response) are a feature of most surveys especially longitudinal/panel studies. And many such studies now have multilevel designs and hence multilevel data structures. Recent advances in imputation methodology now offer social researchers opportunities to address issues of missing data in a statistically principled way. Paradata can offer great insights in understanding the nature and causes of missingness and can b…
Systematic Social Observation
Systematic social observation (SSO) is the application of rigorous, replicable, and generalizable approaches from survey methodology to field observation (ethnography). SSO provides researchers with independent, robust, and quantifiable data about the forms of social interactions most commonly obtained through qualitative inquiry. This chapter begins with a general overview of the SSO approach. Section 14.3 describes the application of SSO approa…
Mind the step
The ‘England and Wales Sentencing Guidelines’ aim to promote consistency by organizing the sentencing process as a sequence of steps, with initial judicial assessments subsequently adjusted to reflect relevant case characteristics. Yet, existing evaluations of the guidelines have failed to incorporate this structure adequately, instead concentrating solely on sentence outcomes. We use multivariate multilevel models to offer new insights into the …
Crime-general and crime-specific spatial patterns
How Collective Is Collective Efficacy? The Importance of Consensus in Judgments About Community Cohesion and Willingness to Intervene
Existing studies have generally measured collective efficacy by combining survey respondents’ ratings of their local area into an overall summary for each neighborhood. Naturally, this approach results in a substantive focus on the variation in average levels of collective efficacy between neighborhoods. In this article, we focus on the variation in consensus of collective efficacy judgments. To account for differential consensus among neighborho…
The Falling Carbon Footprint of Acquisitive and Violent Offences
Cutting carbon emissions, wherever they occur, is a global priority and those associated with crime are no exception. We show that between 1995 and 2015, the carbon footprint of acquisitive and violent crime has dropped by 62 per cent, a total reduction of 54 million tonnes CO2e throughout this period. Although the environmental harm associated with crime is likely to be considered lower in importance than social or economic impacts, a focus on r…
Depression, anxiety and delinquency
The main aim of this research is to investigate to what extent within-individual changes in anxiety and depression are related to within-individual changes in theft and violence. The youngest sample of the Pittsburgh Youth Study (PYS), a prospective longitudinal survey of 503 boys followed up from age 7 onwards, was analyzed. Depression and anxiety were measured for boys from ages 11 to 16 as were moderate and serious forms of self-reported theft…
Patterns and Drivers of Co-production in Neighbourhood Watch in England and Wales
Established in England and Wales in the context of the neo-liberal governments of the 1980s and promoted through the New Local agenda of New Labour and beyond, Neighborhood Watch (NW) is a primary means through which the state and citizens may co-produce crime control. However, whether citizens have the time or inclination to co-produce is debated and it is generally believed that NW proliferates in advantaged, low crime rate areas that need it l…
Exploring the origin of sentencing disparities in the Crown Court
Reassessing the relationship between procedural justice and police legitimacy
OBJECTIVE: A large body of cross-sectional research has identified a positive relationship between perceptions of police procedural justice and legitimacy. Following Tyler's theoretical framework, studies have often interpreted the observed relationship as evidence of an unequivocal causal connection from procedural justice to legitimacy. Here we reexamined the validity of this conclusion by considering the temporal order of that association and …
Re-assessing the Consistency of Sentencing Decisions in Cases of Assault
Empirical research has repeatedly focused on the potential existence of sentencing disparities. In particular, a growing number of studies have used multilevel models to quantify the extent that ‘similar’ offences are treated alike in different courts. This reliance on multilevel models has resulted in a natural focus on differences in the mean sentence awarded between courts, with the amount of within-group variability generally assumed to be th…
Police Legitimacy and the Norm to Cooperate
Psychology (29 obras) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (23 obras) · Social Psychology (20 obras) · Political science (19 obras) · Criminology (18 obras) · Sociology (17 obras) · Computer Science (14 obras) · Geography (12 obras) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (11 obras) · Mathematics (10 obras)