Making Participation Tangible: A Methodological Reflection on the Potentials and Limitations of Immersive Virtual Reality, Electrodermal Activity Measurement, and Qualitative Inquiry in the Analysis of Urban Fear Spaces

The subjective perception of safety in public space is a crucial indicator of urban participation, shaping how people experience and navigate their surroundings. Urban fear spaces highlight how physical, social, and emotional factors unequally structure access to and use of public environments, linking spatial perception to social justice. This paper addresses the question: What opportunities and limitations does a mixed-methods approach—combining immersive Virtual Reality (VR), electrodermal activity (EDA) measurement, and semi-structured interviews—offer for examining subjective perceptions of urban fear? It offers a methodological reflection on an exploratory study of potential fear spaces on the campus of Ruhr University Bochum, hypothesizing that mixed-methods integration reveals non-conscious arousal patterns inaccessible via verbal data alone. We discuss methodological potentials and limitations in integrating physiological data within qualitative frameworks. The study design comprised VR simulation, physiological signal acquisition, and qualitative interpretation and triangulation. Findings show that combining immersive VR with EDA detects non-conscious physiological arousal patterns that would remain inaccessible through verbal data alone, while simultaneously revealing substantial interpretative challenges that necessitate qualitative contextualization. Integrating interviews proved vital for linking physiological patterns to subjective meaning. The reflection concludes with implications for applying such multimodal approaches in participatory urban planning and spatial research.