Methodological Lessons learned from the Luxembourgish Safety Survey

In 2011, the European Commission submitted a proposal to the European Parliament to conduct the “European Safety Survey” (SASU) in 2013, to gather EU-wide data regarding victimization, fear of crime, and other crime related experiences and opinions. The SASU questionnaire was pretested using an adjusted and shortened version of the International Crime Victims Survey questionnaire. However, the European Parliament rejected the proposal because of concerns over the survey’s costs and questions regarding its “added value”, given that some member states already were conducting their own victimization surveys. Because the EU-wide approach had failed and Luxembourg had no victimization survey of its own, the “Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques” (STATEC) decided to conduct the “Luxembourgish Safety Survey” to obtain updated data using the Safety Survey questionnaire. This paper presents the main methodological findings from the “Luxembourgish Safety Survey”: Why is Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing problematic? Does the order of questions matter? Which questions didn’t work?