The spatial dimension of fear of crime is generally neglected in both research and surveys. This is a reflection of a particular academic interest within this field of study where fear of crime have been viewed more as a mental state than as a mental event and furthermore it is a reflection of the methodological and technical challenges presented by surveying spatial information in traditional survey formats such telephone interviews or mail surveys. However, some studies have emphasised fear of crime as an experience, which can be located in time and space, but these studies have had a limited scope (such as a single residential neighbourhood). Hence, there is a need to explore the spatialdimension of fear of crime more extensively and on a large scale, and study the places where people from different neighbourhoods experience fear.

This paper will discuss a) challenges related to surveying emotions and experiences related to fear of crime such as sequence and phrasing of questions, b) Web-GIS methods for surveying this type of spatial information in light of the problems associated with web-survey formats in general such as representativety of responses, response completion rates etc. and c) the perspectives of this kind of web-GIS survey format in terms of producing useful knowledge on the spatial dimension of fear. The paper will draw on preliminary results from a recent web survey on fear of crime in the City of Copenhagen, Denmark.