Student Attitude to Campus Safety Student Numbers: 1403261, 1406960, 1405796, 1404386
Introduction
Areas
Location
Nights Out
The overall aim of our survey is to understand student's attitudes towards safety and security in and around the Bognor Regis Campus.
To establish whether the security on campus affects how students commute to university To identify whether there is a correlation between where students live and their view of campus safety. To determine whether students have safety plans for nights out and if so how they can be improved. To establish which areas of the campus can be most improved.
When the group first decided on a research topic our first objective was to start secondary research to allow us to understand what data was already out there and areas that were less well developed that we could possibly expand on. (Denscombe, 2002, p2) states that research must have “clearly stated aims that are related to existing knowledge and needs”. The research was established before we started to create the survey so that we would find it easier to compare our collected data to existing data, although we had some difficulties in finding any specific research broad information was more readily available. By establishing the components that affect student safety we were able to produce questions which gave a wide aspect of students attitudes and opinions.
voted to mostly consists of 19 year olds Age distribution among respondents
as 21 out of the 50 were of this age. The
25
remaining participants aging between
Number of students who have procedures on nights out
18 to 25, revealing the results to be
20
32
30
formed from young adults. As Allen et al (1998)explains there is a correlation between the age distribution relating to
15
25
10
crime, Gottfredon and Hirschi (1983) further explains that “Jueveniles may be more likely
The results of the questionnaire
than adults to be arrested either because they
Gender Distribution
Replies to questionnaire: 50
19
20
21
Male 54%
The graph reveals that only a small number of students live within the halls on campus, whether in Longbrook or Barbara smith. By asking this question it could reveal one of two things:
100.0 90.0
If there is a correlation between living on campus and how safe students feel as a whole.
80.0 70.0
If there is a correlation between living on/off campus and which areas are felt to be less unsafe than others.
60.0 50.0 40.0 30.0
It would be natural to assume that those who live in campus would have more knowledge of the area and therefor feel safer than those who do not, however this will be explored and concluded throughout.
20.0 10.0 0.0 Male
Female
Male
2012/13
Female
Male
Female
2013/14
2014/15
23
24
25
One of the key areas of our survey was to evaluate how students feel towards certain areas of the campus, to find out what areas to choose from within the campus we interviewed a security guard to find out their views on what could be changed within the campus and any areas in particular which he they viewed as needing more work then others. We then had a guided tour of the campus in which he showed us the entrance points around the university campus and areas that needed improvement, this helped us build our survey questions as we had first hand experience of the area. We made a point in our survey to include areas both within the day and at night as people are likely to have very different views on them at different times as their priorities of how they perceive safety and security will change. The attitudes of the students towards campus safety can be described as a “pattern of evaluative responses towards a person, object, or issue” (Colman, 2001) in our survey the students are critically thinking about their opinions towards campus.
Percentage of respondents who Live in Bognor Regis: 40% Live in Chichester: 37.% Other: 22.5%
7. How safe do you feel around the Bognor Regis Campus as a whole? 40
4.b. where do you live?
35
Number of Students
30
15
10
5
0
On Campus
Off Campus
Distribution of types of transport to the university.
Walk
32
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
Type of transport
Out of the 50 students asked, 32 of these walk to the university, revealing them to live within the Bognor Regis area. This is key information as it is assumable that those who live within the area have a higher knowledge of the safety within this location. This will be made evident in the later analysis The mode of travel could affect the view that people have on the university,. This will affect their viewpoint towards Bognor campus. Critical areas that could have been questioned have been scrapped by this question and other areas developed.
Number of Students
This graph is showing the opinions of how people felt about certain areas on security operations on Bognor campus. Lighting is considered the worst and should be looked at as 60% of all those replying to the survey said specifically lighting Is something which majorly affects how they perceive safety. Security guards are the best rated here as the majority of people feel safe with them around. There seems to be a strong presence of them as a lot of people commented that it’s good. “Many schools prevent access from outside and have a controlled ‘one access only system.” (The health and safety guide for schools and colleges, 2002, p. 53) . This could apply to Bognor Regis campus as monitored entrances are a common way for security whilst being very visible to the public which can make the perception of safety and security.
24
No
Don't Know
Student Procedures on nights out
Out of the procedures suggested the most frequent procedure was walking home in a group with 77% of respondents stating that they use this method. This is likely due to the reduced cost associated with this procedure as students can be highly affected by the costs of a product or service.
Total
Bognor
6
16
4
0
26
Chichester
3
7
5
0
15
Other
3
4
1
1
9
12
27
10
1
50
Comparing how commuting students feel about safety compared to those who live closer to Bognor using MannWhitney T-Test
A comparison where students live in compared to how they perceive safety and security on the Bognor Regis campus.
26
20.77
540.00
Chichester
14
20.00
280.00
Total
40
2 1.5 1
175.000 280.000 -.221 .825 .856b
AREA 2
One of the key points from the corresponding question which asked what factors influence their safety during the day and from this one of the most frequent responses was lighting with 39% of students stating this was a key factor.
AREA 1
0%
10%
20%
30% Very Safe
40% Adequately Safe
50% Indifferent
60% Unsafe
70%
80%
90%
At night the overall responses fell in favourability and so the amount of respondents who chose Very or Adequately safe fell to just 48% which is less then half of all the responses.
Area 3 had the highest positive responses rate at 61%, on the other hand Area 4 had the largest amount of negative responses at 54%.
AREA 1
30%
40% Adequately Safe
50% Indifferent
60% Unsafe
70%
80%
90%
11.2. Lighting
11.3. Monitored Entrances
11.4. Security Guards
100%
This rise in negative responses may show to the university that this is more important area to improve.
The chart shows that 48% felt that they are doing enough however also 42% didn’t know whether enough is happening this shows that there may be lack of knowledge between the governing body and students. This is true from another question in our survey where we asked how educated do you feel on the safety procedures in your accommodation to which 50% of students stated that they had vague understanding.
Correlation Coefficient
N 15. Do you have any procedures for being safe on
Correlation Coefficient
Sig. (2-tailed) N
1.000
-.049
.
.733
50
50
-.049
1.000
.733
.
50
50
So we reject the null hypothesis. The critical region is surpassed by our results seeing as all our values for the spearman’s rank test is higher than critical value.
Needs Immediate Attention
Generally our group struggled to use SPSS as all ranking data needed to be translated manually which was unfortunate for us as we had 4 questions which needed changing thus taking a lot of time to fix. Further problems also arose as the majority of the group were unable to get hold of their own copy of SPSS which resulted on reliance of University computers which didn’t work all the time too. As all the group were contributing to areas of the poster it resulted in needing to be constantly updated so all the group were looking at the same poster. This was stressful to keep management of as surprisingly there is no program which allows multiple users to be editing a publisher style document which would have helped significantly and removed this problem.
Spearman’s Rank
Area 1 Day
Area 2 Day
Area 3 Day
Area 4 Day
Area 5 Day
Area 1 Night
.483
.624
.316
.478
.387
Area 2 Night
.475
.681
.268
.423
.384
Area 3 Night
.453
.446
.735
.474
.522
Area 4 Night
.259
.312
.118
.576
.459
Area 5 Night
.243
.461
.266
.612
.701
The highlighted areas in the table above is the data which we are interested in as this is comparing the same area at different times of day. The rest of the data is irrelevant as there is no common variable as you cannot compare Area 1 day with Area 3 night H0: There is no association between the safety that is perceived between the Area 1 –5 at day and Area 1-5 at night H1: There is an association between the safety that is perceived between the Area 1-5 at day and Area 1-5 at night The critical value coefficient for 0.05 significance level for N of 50 is 0.2732. As all of our values are above this we reject the null association. Which means that this is a minimum level of association and as all of our important values are above this level it means they are all significant. – day and night, the rest of the data here is a irrelevant as there is no common ground between the data as you cannot area 3 at day time compared to area 5 at night. So the spearman’s rank shows some information that is not useful for us which will be ignored. The relevant data however will be used to correlate to see how related the data is to one another.
Correlation (%)
Levels
>19
Very low
20 - 39
Low
40 - 69
Modest
70 - 89
High
90 - 100
Very high
H0 Mann Whitney: (Null Hypothesis): There is a significant difference between safety and security of the campus having an effect on students choice of university and the area of where you live. H1 (Alternative Hypothesis): : There is no significant difference between safety and security of the campus having an effect on students choice of university and the area of where you live. To conclude we accept the null hypothesis, the Asymp.Sig (2-tailed) is greater than 0.05 with our value being 0.825, so we reject the alternative hypothesis and so there is significant difference between the difference of safety and security of the campus having an effect on students choice of university and the area of where you live.
7. How safe do you feel around the Bognor Regis
After we have completed our survey we realised some areas at which if we were to do again could be modified easily to give us more information, just one example could be question 12: How do you commute to university? Some options were not listed for example Train or even an other option to specify if there mode of transport that is not there. This has resulted in our data looking strange as it shows 30 people living outside Bognor area but only 18 people travel by other means than walking. Which leads to the assumption that some people would have listed themselves as walking although they travel by train for example.
11.5. Self Defences Classes
The following pie chart shows whether students believe the university is doing enough to ensure their safety, based on Viner's Model where “when there is a failure of a hazard control mechanism that accident, injury or damage may occur” (Viner, 1991).
30
Reflection
0 11.1. CCTV
25
How safe do you Do you have any procefeel around the dures for being safe on Bognor Regis cam- nights out?
Sig. (2-tailed)
Similar to the day question this is most likely due to lighting being a more relevant problem at night especially in badly lit/unlit areas.
Very Safe
20
100%
Correlations
Students views towards certain areas of the campus at night
20%
15
Needs Immediate Attention
Spearman's rank
10%
10
H1: There is association between how safe people feel around Bognor Regis campus and people having procedures during nights out.
Area 1 had the highest positive response rate at 84%, where as Area 4 had the highest amount of negative
0%
5
H0: There is no association between how safe people feel around Bognor Regis campus and people having procedures during nights out.
a. Grouping Variable: 4.b. If not, where do you live? b. Not corrected for ties.
0.5
Walking home in a group
AREA 3
Sum of Ranks
Bognor
Mann-Whitney U Wilcoxon W Z Asymp. Sig. (2tailed) Exact Sig. [2*(1tailed Sig.)]
2.5
Mean Rank
Test Statistics 9. Did the safety and security of the campus have an effect on your choice of university?
3.5 3
N
One member of the group does not consume alcohol
The subsequent question we asked as to why people don’t have procedures showed that 21% of students asked don’t put procedures in place due to the cost of them.
Ranks
4.b. If not, where do you live?
Arrange for a friend to pick you up
Getting a taxi
The people answered our survey stated that the safety of the campus as a whole high. The cross tabulation defines our audience’s opinion, so there is less people who thought that the campus was dangerous. Most of the people of Bognor thought that the campus was safe, but the people of Chichester approved Bognor less. Bognor’s image is perceived as bad in other areas seeing as more people in Chichester voted that the BRC is bad, despite nearly half responses in total in comparison to Bognor. This question poses a more important question in regards to people’s feelings towards the Campus not the general area. The town has a history of not being fully developed in comparison to other cities in the West Sussex area. The general inclinations of the survey presents us with information that there is a great interest in the Bognor campus, seeing as there are hardly any scores on the not safe side pf the survey. There is hardly anyone who think that the campus is really bad , so people have a positive outlook on the campus and University specifically. This tells us that Other and Chichester have a general positive view of this campus, but not necessarily this town.
The average opinion of improvements on security aspects
21
Yes
Unsafe
9. Did the safety and security of the campus have an effect on your choice of university?
Pie Chart to show if students feel the university is doing enough to ensure their safety within campus
5
Indifferent
No
Response
20
14
0
Safe
Total
4
Car
Yes
Number of Respondents
AREA 2
Very Safe
25
0
Bus
0
0
45
Distribution of types of transport to the university by students
Bicycle
5
AREA 3
Distribution of Students on and off Campus
By finding this information before we developed are survey we were able to design questions around the existing data which allows for more detailed to be gained from the data.
15
AREA 4
During the day we found that students were more favourable to the areas with 66% of responses being either Very or Adequately safe, this could be due to many factors such as lighting etc.
AREA 4
The office for national statistics undertook research into young peoples measures of well being and a particular question looked into the views on walking alone after dark. Throughout all the years they found that women did not feel as safe as men by an average of 28%.
18
10
AREA 5
AREA 5
Percentage of Young people who feel safe walking alone after dark
20
Students views towards certain areas of the campus during the day
The main question for this aim was to find out students perceptions of certain areas around Bognor campus in both day and night.
The picture of living location of our participates tells us a lot about the type of students that we are analysing. It also indicates how many of the students actually live on campus whether it be Chichester or Bognor Regis. This may affect our results as their knowledge and experience of the campus may be limited if little time is spent there opposed to those who may live on site. We cannot show ‘Other’ as the location of these many of these people have left sections blank saying where they are from making it impossible to correctly add them to the map.
Distribution of students on/off campus
Graph to show percentage of people aged 16-24 that felt fairly/very safe walking alone after dark
22
commit a larger portion of their offences in groups, or because they are less skilled in evasion”. Further revealing that younger students and participants within the survey are more exposed to crime. This may lead to their opinions and thoughts regarding their safety to be different to those of a higher age. Whether this be in a positive or negative way, positive being because of their knowledge of crime they may feel the campus is safer than others because of their exposure however their thoughts could be negatively effective due to their knowledge making them more aware and sensitive towards their safety. It would be simple to assume that those of a younger age may feel the campus is not as safe as the older participants.
Mean: 19.7
Female 46%
0
Age
Mode : 19
The Gender in our survey is crucial to relate to. There are more males that participated in our survey, whereas there are more females in the actual population of the campus, so this affects our survey. Naturally we thought the results would conclude in participants stating they felt safer than they actually are because of a higher percentage of males taking part within the survey.
5
18
Median age : 19
30 people responded to whether they had procedures or not. This result is likely to be so low as no question was included in the survey to ask if they go out or not so they were likely to miss out the question as it can be misdirecting. The majority of people that did answer however is that 19 (57%) of people say that they have at least one procedure which they will follow. This is likely to be higher as some people who don’t go out will likely press no which is true that they don’t have a procedure
35
Nunmber of respondents
1. 2. 3. 4.
The mode of the age distribution from the graph reveals the participants who voted to mostly consists of 19 year olds as 21 out of the 50 were of this age. The remaining participants aging between 18 to 25, revealing the results to be formed from young adults. The mode of the age distribution from the graph reveals the participants who
Number of Respondents
The objectives that we are survey aimed to accomplish are stated below:
Another key point within university life for some students can be nightlife, therefore safety can be a major factor on whether students go out and how they manage themselves on a night out. The student union also run a safety bus service which is used by many students and allow for safe transport after nights out as well as for getting home safely. “Security arrangements for colleges differ according to the nature of the area, and the local risks.” (The Health and Safety Guide for Schools and Colleges, 2002, p53) Due to student feedback the safety bus may have felt like a needed procedure for students in this area and hence has been funded through the student body.
Percentage
We were looking to do a chi-squared for comparison it but required more data in order to work as a lot of areas have less than 5 respondents resulting in incorrect data. If we were to do this again we would definitely look for more respondents and this could be done in numerous ways, for example giving more incentive to fill in our survey such as a larger prize, having our survey online for a longer period of time with greater advertisement and going around Halls physically to get people to fill in the survey as people are more likely to complete it. We should have added more questions focused towards those in halls as these people are on campus a lot more than other students and as only 10 people responded on-campus this does not give an accurate representation of their demographic. Initially we planned to build our questions around literature, however as campus safety is very specific resulting in little to no reports that could be related properly. This would have resulted in better questions which in turn would have given us access to a greater use of questions as we found ourselves using question 7 “How safe do you feel around Bognor campus as a whole.” a lot. Using this approach would have been an easier transition from turning SPSS data into more advanced methods of evaluation. Lastly our group would have liked to have a larger area than just Bognor campus, if we could have added Chichester campus questions to those who live there, this would’ve been great as all the data can be compared very well against each other if the same questions were used to show which campus succeeds in certain areas which can give more suggestions about what campus is making people feel secure better. This could have been a problem though as adding more questions to the survey could result in less people willing to fill it out completely resulting in less surveys completed.
Conclusion To conclude we succeeded to some extent in finding out students’ attributes to security and safety on campus. Our aims were to identify areas of improvement and state which areas are considered safe in the Bognor campus. We are satisfied to say that the majority of university students would say they feel at least moderately safe within the Bognor campus. Some people feeling that improvement is needed with lighting in the campus coming out as a obvious place for the university as 60% of people specifically said that proper lighting is at one of the most important parts of what makes them feel safe. Our results give us useful information about the security and safety of the campus, the majority of our findings came as a shock to us, but some were expected. This survey was a success as we have completed our four objectives which are stated in the introduction, and backed up our findings with appropriate graphs and tests accordingly.
Area 1
Area 2
Area 3
Area 4
Area 5
23.3
46.4
54
33.2
49.1
References Colman, A. M. (2001) A dictionary of psychology. New York: Oxford University Press. Denscombe, M. (2002) Ground Rules for Good Research. .
The table above shows all of the data is either low or moderately correlated with area 1 and 4 being the lowest this is suggesting that people have mixed feels, showing that some people will deem it safe while others do not. Areas 2, 3 and 5 however are relatively similar floating around the 50% mark. As these three areas are very similar suggests that many students have a similar opinion on these areas. This does not show if students feel these areas need improvement only showing that as the more scared people feel the more likely they are to feel scared during the night too, however the mean will show whether people feel each area to be improved.
ONS (2015) Young People’s Well-being Measures. Available at: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/wellbeing/measuring-national -well-being/children-and-young-people-s-well-being-in-the-uk--october-2015/rft-table-2.xls (Accessed: December 2015). The health and safety guide for schools and colleges (2002) London: Association of Teachers & Lecturers (ATL). Viner, D. (1994) Accident analysis and risk control. Fairfield, Vic.: VRJ Delphi.