Contemporary Comment The New South Wales Property Crime Decline

Abstract On 12 September 2013 the New South Wales (NSW) Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) released the latest crime statistics for NSW. According to these statistics, the substantial decline in property crime in NSW that started in 2001 continues. Falls of 60-70 per cent in the rate of burglary, motor vehicle theft and different forms of robbery have occurred between 2000 and 2013. Little attention has been given to this great property crime decline in criminological and wider media publications. Given the substantial human and financial savings associated with these declines, this limited attention is disappointing. This Contemporary Comment provides a brief (and necessarily limited) overview of recent property crime trends in NSW, Australia and the wider Western world, before giving a tentative estimate of the savings derived from this property crime decline in NSW. Calculated using the Australian Institute of Criminology's costs of crime values (Rollings 2008), our preliminary estimate of the savings to the NSW community related to the drop in property crime in the last 12 years is A$5.15 billion dollars. We conclude by reviewing some of the explanations offered for the crime decline and urge that greater consideration be given to why these falls have occurred in the hope that such insights might inform future criminal justice and crime prevention policies

Products as Affective Modifiers of Identities

© The Author(s) 2015. Are salesclerks seen as better, more powerful, or more active when they drive Mustangs? What about entrepreneurs? What about driving a mid-sized car? Intuitively, we have ideas about these, but much of the research on the affective nature of products is on purchasing, desires, and self-fulfillment. Drawing on symbolic interactionism, we argue that people's association with products has some basis in the impression management of their identity. For this to occur, there must be some cultural consensus about the way that products modify identities. Drawing on affect control theory's (ACT) methodology and equations, we measure the goodness, powerfulness, and activeness of several products, identities, and the associated product-modified identities to explore how products function as affective modifiers of identities. We find consistent effects across several types of technology products, whereby products pull the modified identity in the direction of the products' affective qualities. Support is established for the ACT equations that predict how traits modify identities as also having utility for predicting how products modify identities. This suggests that the opening questions can be answered empirically by measuring cultural-specific sentiments of the identity and the product and by developing equations to predict the identity modification process

How “Stuff” Matters in Affect Control Theory

Physical artifacts are not neutral but are increasingly recognized across the social sciences as important to structuring meaning and social interaction. Affect control theory shows promise as a framework for articulating and exploring the role of the material world in everyday life. In this study, we formalize, extend, and elaborate this line of research, instituting physical artifacts within affect control theory. We examine how physical artifacts function within affect control theory as modifiers of identities. We undertake a full-scale identity-modification study, collecting affective meaning data from 825 respondents on 58 identities, 52 physical artifacts, and 212 artifact-modified identities across a range of identities and artifact types. We empirically estimate how physical artifacts change perceptions of identities and illustrate the application of the new equations by deriving artifact-modified identities from a range of hypothetical scenarios. Using a transformation of the equations, we also simulate how people may use physical artifacts to create a desired impression when occupying different identities. Through establishing physical artifacts within affect control theory, this research raises new questions and opportunities for the theory and those interested in the design, use, and experience of physical artifacts

The New South Wales Property Crime Decline

On 12 September 2013 the New South Wales (NSW) Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) released the latest crime statistics for NSW. According to these statistics, the substantial decline in property crime in NSW that started in 2001 continues. Falls of 60-70 per cent in the rate of burglary, motor vehicle theft and different forms of robbery have occurred between 2000 and 2013. Little attention has been given to this great property crime decline in criminological and wider media publications. Given the substantial human and financial savings associated with these declines, this limited attention is disappointing. This Contemporary Comment provides a brief (and necessarily limited) overview of recent property crime trends in NSW, Australia and the wider Western world, before giving a tentative estimate of the savings derived from this property crime decline in NSW. Calculated using the Australian Institute of Criminology's costs of crime values (Rollings 2008), our preliminary estimate of the savings to the NSW community related to the drop in property crime in the last 12 years is A$5.15 billion dollars. We conclude by reviewing some of the explanations offered for the crime decline and urge that greater consideration be given to why these falls have occurred in the hope that such insights might inform future criminal justice and crime prevention policies

Evaluation informing change: The Wilkinson Architecture Building

Abstract not available

Knowledge, Perceived Benefits, Adoption, and Use of Smart Home Products

What are the relationships between knowledge of, perceived benefits, adoption of, and use of smart home products? To explore this question, in our first two studies we focus on the general population’s perceptions of benefits across many types of smart home products by creating a corpus of smart home product descriptions. Study 1 (n = 399) shows that previous product knowledge influences a range of perceived benefits. Study 2 (n = 242) demonstrates which benefits increase non-owners’ likelihood of adopting these products. In study 3, we longitudinally survey eight residents in living laboratory houses equipped with 10 integrated smart home products. We find over a year access to the products increases perceptions of their benefits, but does not increase their actual use. Collectively, these studies contribute to an increased understanding of the relationship among benefits, use, and adoption of this emerging technology