Promoting safety and preventing crime through a setting-oriented approach requires a structured procedure for planning the various activities to be carried out. The procedure involves mobilizing the population and intersectoral partners, making safety diagnoses and drawing up action plans. The Safety Diagnosis Tool Kit for Local Communities was prepared to assist with this procedure. It comprises several tools, including the Safety Diagnosis Handbook and six methodology guides. The document Turning Safety Diagnoses Into Action Plans: A Guide for Local Communities was prepared in addition to the tool kit, to facilitate the process of translating diagnoses into effective action plans.

To make sound decisions as to what should be done to improve safety and prevent crime in a...

Like discussion groups, direct observation and literature reviews, semi-structured interviews can be used to gather qualitative information. Interviews of this type are suited to working with small samples and are effective for studying specific situations or for supplementing and validating information derived from other sources used for making safety diagnoses. In addition, since they provide access to perceptions and opinions, they are useful for gaining insight into problems that are not perceptible immediately or are more difficult to observe, but that nonetheless cause concern in certain areas or in certain segments of the population.

During safety diagnoses, semi-structured interviews should be used to explore crime and safety problems perceived by representatives of the...

A focus group is a group discussion led by a facilitator. Participants are asked to share their thoughts on a particular topic, based on their personal opinions and experience. They are also encouraged to react to the views expressed by other participants and to say where they stand in relation to those views.

In the model proposed in this guide, focus group participants are selected on the basis of criteria that ensure the life setting under study is well represented. This approach guarantees that the groups provide a wide range of viewpoints and perceptions, and can thus help to shed light on the different opinions and degree of consensus that exist on a given topic, such as the feeling of safety in a regional county municipality (RCM) or a municipality. In safety diagnoses,...

In making safety diagnoses, it is sometimes useful to estimate or quantify certain behaviours or environmental features through direct observation of life settings. This observation method makes it possible to gather and analyze information on a series of problem safety situations related to the characteristics or behaviour of individuals (incivility) or to certain characteristics of the physical environment (disorder). Generally speaking, it requires the use of an observation log for entering information on the safety situations under study.

Even though it is difficult to foresee all of the problem safety situations that can arise in life settings, we have singled out a certain number on the basis of the scientific literature. All of these situations10 are included in the...