Safety questionnaire

The safety questionnaire directed to residents can be used in planning local crime prevention work.

Council for Crime Prevention has drafted a safety questionnaire for municipalities. The questionnaire has the potential of gathering extensive information from the residents to support local safety work and to hear their views of the safety of their residential area and their municipality. With local safety questionnaires it is possible to gather both new information and information that completes official information, such as the statistics of the police. The questionnaires can also assist in the regional targeting of existing statistic information.

The questionnaire can be used to gather residents’ views on local safety and their experiences of e.g. crimes and disturbances, victimization, insecurity, or accidents. With the background data collected with the questionnaire (e.g. respondents’ age, gender, neighbourhood) it is possible to compare the results among different demographic groups. The results from the questionnaire are useful in planning and targeting local security work.

The pilot questionnaire drafted by the Council was conducted in the cities of Vaasa and Hyvinkää in 2012, after which it was updated in 2016 and 2021. In recent years, the survey has been used by such cities as Turku, Tampere and Vantaa in their security work.

Carrying out the questionnaire

The questionnaire can be carried out as an open web-based questionnaire or it can be sent by mail. The questionnaire can be directed to all citizens or to a certain sample. All communities have the possibility to use the questionnaire draft made by the Council. The Council does not collect payment for the use of the questionnaire. The questionnaire draft is available in Finnish and Swedish, but it can be translated into other languages as well.

An open web-based safety questionnaire is rather easy and affordable to execute. The questionnaire can be carried out by using the Webropol system. Most effort is required in getting the work started (e.g. spreading information about the questionnaire locally) and analyzing the results. A mail questionnaire directed to a sample might give more trustworthy results in how experiences and views of crime and safety issues are divided among the population, but it requires a sufficiently large sample and answer percent.

For more information, please contact Senior Planning Officer Markus Alanko of the Secretariat of the Council for Crime Prevention.