Document details

Measuring cybercrime and cyberdeviance in surveys

In: The Routledge International Handbook of Online Deviance
Roderick S. Graham; Stephan G. Humer; Claire Seungeun Lee; Veronika Nagy (eds.)
London; New York: Routledge (2025), pp. 44-72

CC BY

"Cybercrime has been on the rise since the 1990s, and so is the need for researchers and public administrations to better estimate its prevalence, incidence, distribution and nature. The limitations of police statistics as measures of crime are widely known and seem even more severe—in terms of the volume of unrecorded offenses—in the case of cybercrimes. The problem of under-recording may be even more acute for crimes suffered by organizations. From that perspective, victimization surveys with national representative samples are seen as the main alternative to obtain more valid and reliable estimates of cybercrime and cyberdeviance. Self-reported delinquency studies can provide information on juvenile cybercrime and cyberdeviance from the point of view of the offenders and, if accompanied by a victimization module, on the incidents suffered by the younger generations. Surveys also provide information on many other variables that are absent from police or court recorded crimes, related to the personal characteristics of individuals, their everyday activities, cybersecurity practices and so on, which allow identifying key risk factors and testing different theories of online crime and deviance. In addition, surveys conducted regularly can also be key to assessing temporal changes in overall criminal behavior. While we have seen a rapid increase in the number of crime surveys that include measures of cybercrime since the early 2010s, our scoping review has identified a series of practices that could be refined to better measure online victimization and offending, and to enable cross-national and temporal comparisons. Overall, it seems reasonable to state that cybercrime and cyberdeviance is measured less adequately than more traditional crime types. This might be in part due to the ever-changing nature of cyberspace." (Ways forward and conclusions, pages 65-66)