The Difficulties of Invention: On the Multiple Invention of Crime Victim Surveys in Scandinavia and the US in the Post-War Era

Abstract

It is generally assumed that crime victim surveys were almost simultaneously suggested by various American research organizations and a Finnish criminologist in the mid-1960s. This coincidence apparently fits the common sociological pattern of multiple inventions. With hindsight, surveying victims of crime seems so evident an idea that it is a mystery nobody thought of it before—that is, before nearly everybody did. This mystery, however, is entirely a product of our decision to lump together as the same invention unequal contributions to a very broad problem. This hindsight bias is dissected here, using a comparison of different contributions to the application of survey methods to the study of victims of crime. When we speak of multiple inventions, we treat unequal contributions as if they were equivalent, and we become insensitive to the reasons why some have fared better than others. Only by paying attention to these differences can we come to understand why, in the case at hand, American researchers finally brought about an idea with which their Scandinavian counterparts had been toying for two decades.