Beate Völker started as director of NSCR, Peter van der Laan is leaving
Peter van der Laan was appointed interim director of the NSCR in 2019. ‘In this role, he supervised a transformation of the institute in which the focus came to lie on four central research groups’, says Marcel Levi, chairman of the board of NWO-I. ‘In 2020, a fifth research group for evidence-based policing was added, […]
Changes in violent extremist attitudes during the transition from adolescence to young adulthood
From previous research it was unclear how violent extremist attitudes change over the life-course and which factors are related to these changes. The reason was that there was a lack of studies in which people and their political attitudes are followed over time. In the study Understanding changes in violent extremist attitudes during the transition […]
Offending patterns of hackers in website defacements
Previous studies have shown that traditional (offline) types of crime concentrate strongly within offenders, as a small group of chronic offenders is responsible for the majority of offenses. The rest of the offenders tend to have a short criminal career in which they only commit a few crimes often during adolescence or early adulthood. Whether […]
The relationship between criminal behaviour over the life-course and intimate partner violence perpetration in later life focuses on the predictors of intimate partner violence (IPV) in late adulthood. The study is based on the Criminal Career and Life-Course Study, a longitudinal study of men and women convicted in the 1970s and an age matched non-convicted […]
Uncovering the dark figure of wildlife crimes in Olifants West Nature Reserve
Law enforcement rangers need to know where and when crime occurs to effectively design strategies for reducing poaching. Although crime is generally hard to measure, obtaining a representative sample is particularly challenging for wildlife crimes. The vast majority of wildlife crimes are probably never known to anyone other than the offenders involved in the crime. […]
Face-touching behaviour as a possible correlate of mask-wearing
The study Face-touching behaviour as a possible correlate of mask-wearing: A video observational study of public place incidents during the COVID-19 pandemic published in Transboundary and Emerging Diseases offers an analysis of the association between mask-wearing and face-touching in a Western European context, which was tested in two studies. Study 1: sample of both masked […]
Völker will be appointed for a period of five years: ‘I consider it a huge honour to be able to lead this fantastic institute where fundamental and at the same time interdisciplinary research is done into highly relevant societal issues concerning criminal behaviour, justice and democracy.’ The choice for Völker is the outcome of an […]
Human behavior and the similarities with nonhuman primates
Virginia Pallante started her study in biology driven by the interest in how social cohesion is maintained in gregarious animals, trying to understand if similar strategies are shared across different species and how different societies shape the expression of such strategies. She further investigated these issues by focusing on nonhuman primates’ conflict management, a topic […]
It is well established that offenders commit most crimes near their routine activity space: the locations where they engage in their daily activities. However, research examining the geography of offenders’ routine activity spaces has largely been limited to a few core locations such as homes, prior homes, the homes of relatives and prior offense locations. […]
Research is human work and thus subject to error. The article Do offenders avoid offending near home? A systematic review of the buffer zone hypothesis, by NSCR researcher Wim Bernasco and former NSCR intern Remco van Dijke was retracted from Crime Science at the request of the authors after they had been made aware of […]
Video analysis of peer relationships: rich data, a lot of work
Video makes it possible to perform very precise conversational and behavioural analyses. As technology keeps getting better and easier to use, more and more research is done this way. The WORP meets every three months to exchange experiences. Hoeben: ‘We are a multidisciplinary working group with educationalists, psychologists, criminologists and sociologists from – currently – […]
How do people decide who to intervene towards in street conflicts?
Imagine that you are walking down a street and two individuals start to fight. Many of us want to believe that we would intervene and help in this kind of situation. But helping can be challenging – fights are often fast paced and can appear chaotic. There is oftentimes not a clear division between who […]
