1 Title: In Search of the Fear of Crime: Using Interdisciplinary Insights to Improve the Conceptualisation and Measurement of Everyday Insecurities. Authors: Emily Gray, Jonathan Jackson and Stephen Farrall. Abstract: This chapter provides a critical overview of research on public insecurities about crime. Spanning several decades and continents, this body of work tends to focus on negative emotional responses (fear, worry or anxiety) to the threat of common crime categories (burglary, theft, assault). First, the chapter charts the emergence of the fear of crime from the policy-relevant victimisations surveys of the 1960s in America, to its transformation into a staple feature of government statistics and object of academic significance. Despite the topic‘s high status however, it has remained a slippery research subject - with real methodological complexities at its core. We outline some important breakthroughs from feminist and ‗left realist‘ scholars, and highlight advances using experience-based questions and the ‗expressive‘ dimensions of public insecurities about crime. Recognising the value of interdisciplinary research, we review what criminologists studying the fear of crime might learn from the ‗psychology of survey response‘, studies in ‗everyday emotions‘, and the better use of quantitative techniques and longitudinal data to capture the multi-dimensional and dynamic nature of fear. Keywords: Fear of crime; insecurity; everyday emotions; quantitative research; qualitative research. 1: Introduction The body of work on the ‗fear of crime‘ is vast, spans several decades and continents , and attracts continuing interest from politicians and academics alike. Most of this work focuses on negative emotional responses (fear, worry or anxiety) to the threat of common crime categories (burglary, theft, assault and so on). Surveys suggest that the fear of crime is wide- spread amongst members of many contemporary westernised societies. Since 2000 the British Crime Survey has found that around one sixth of the population have reported high levels of worry about burglary, car theft and violent crime (Nicholas et al., 2007). Studies undertaken in the USA (Skogan and Maxfield, 1981), Australia (Enders and Jennett, 2009), Europe (Holland, van der Wurff et al., 1989, Switzerland, Killias and Clerci, 2000:439-40, Germany, Kury and Obergfell-Fuchs, 2008, Sweden, Heber, 2007 and Spain, Serrano-Maillo and Kury, 2008), and newly industrialised economies like China (Zhang et al., 2009) and Brazil (Dammert and Malone, 2006) also testify to heightened public insecurities about falling victim of crime. Fear of crime is often seen to constitute a social problem in and of itself (Hale, 1996), reducing quality of life and public health (Stafford et al., 2007; Jackson and Stafford, 2009), restricting movements (Ferraro, 1995), eroding social and neighbourhood bonds (Lavrakas, 1981), and shaping the very organisation and zoning of a city. Yet while reducing fear and providing reassurance to the community has, at times, become as important as the reduction of actual crime among policy makers, understanding the nature of fear has been fraught with challenges and pitfalls. On the one hand there seems a mismatch between officially modelled ‗likelihood‘ statistics (self reported victimisation) and lay perceptions of risk; on the other hand standard survey designs may inadvertently exaggerate the extent of the fear of crime (Lee, 1999; Farrall and Gadd, 2004), distort the nature of fear as it is experienced in everyday life (Gabriel and Greve, 2003), fail to recognise the functional aspects of worry (Jackson and Gray, 2009), and struggle to capture the ‗expressive‘ properties of crime fears (Girling et al., 2000; Jackson, 2006; Farrall et al 2009).