Explaining subjective well-being: The role of victimization, trust, health, and social norms

This paper extends research on the relation between crime and happiness by investigating the impact of serious and less serious crime (i.e. incorrect behavior) on subjective well-being using a representative survey of the Dutch adult population in 2008. We also control for variables reflecting trust, health and social norms, in addition to standard demographic and socio-economic characteristics. We find that people who feel healthy, have more trust in others and have higher social norms are in general happier. We find evidence of an indirect effect of victimization on well-being via trust, health and social norms. The remaining effect of victimization on well-being, keeping trust, social norms, and health constant, is quite weak

Peer Reporting and the Perception of Fairness

Economic motives are not the only reasons for committing a (small) crime. People consider social norms and perceptions of fairness before judging a situation and acting upon it. If someone takes a bundle of printing paper from the office for private use at home, then a colleague who sees this can take action by talking to the offender or someone else (peer reporting). We investigate how fairness perception influences the decision to act upon incorrect behavior or not

A Comparison of Four Probability-Based Online and Mixed-Mode Panels in Europe

Inferential statistics teach us that we need a random probability sample to infer from a sample to the general population. In online survey research, however, volunteer access panels, in which respondents self-select themselves into the sample, dominate the landscape. Such panels are attractive due to their low costs. Nevertheless, recent years have seen increasing numbers of debates about the quality, in particular about errors in the representativeness and measurement, of such panels. In this article, we describe four probability-based online and mixed-mode panels for the general population, namely, the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences (LISS) Panel in the Netherlands, the German Internet Panel (GIP) and the GESIS Panel in Germany, and the Longitudinal Study by Internet for the Social Sciences (ELIPSS) Panel in France. We compare them in terms of sampling strategies, offline recruitment procedures, and panel characteristics. Our aim is to provide an overview to the scientific community of the availability of such data sources to demonstrate the potential strategies for recruiting and maintaining probability-based online panels to practitioners and to direct analysts of the comparative data collected across these panels to methodological differences that may affect comparative estimates

The Perception of Small Crime

Violations of social norms can be costly to society and they are, in the case of large crimes, followed by prosecution. Minor misbehaviors — small crimes — do not usually result in legal proceedings. Although the economic consequences of a single small crime can be low, such crimes generate substantial losses in the aggregate. In this paper we measure perceptions of incorrect behavior or ‘small crime’, based on a questionnaire administered to a large representative sample from the Dutch population. In the questionnaire we ask the respondents to rate the severity and justifiability of a number of small crimes. We present short questions that only state the nature of the small crime, as well as vignette questions, describing in detail the fictitious person committing the small crime and other factors related to the circumstances in which the small crime is committed. We find that the perceived severity of small crimes varies systematically with characteristics of the respondent as well as of the person committing the crime. Small crimes are considered less serious if committed by someone with lower income. Also, the association between respondent characteristics and perceived seriousness changes if the respondents are given more information about the offender and the circumstances of the offense