The central bureaucratic rigidity flows from the necessity to compare data over time. This is the only way to plot trends. Local imitative timidity, as every local crime survey asked, to be on the safe side, those same Home Office questions. Overall, too much blinkered repetition, and too little imagination. This is one of many often discovered research generated paradoxes.
Young men are much more likely to be mugged, but unafraid of it.
These, and many other problems suggested that it was the standard questions that were responsible for creating this quasi-real fear, and that asking them again and again, and all over the place, and having politicians parrot the cliche that fear of crime was as much of a problem as crime itself, was responsible for maintaining the fear rate at a constant level. Armed with a big research budget from the ESRC, yes, but otherwise just with sheets of blank paper rather than with the usual questions, and we set out to complete detailed personal interviews rather than sterile questionnaires. We were privileged to be given such a research blank cheque. It allowed us to just ask people to tell us, in their own words, what they thought and felt about crime. But this yielded a bewilderingly lengthy list of words.