A first step toward developing better measures of <i>cultural competence</i> and <i>time in destination</i> as predictors of tourist criminal victimization

Based on the data from the 2016–2023 waves of the Barcelona Tourist Survey, this article introduces three variables that fill two specific gaps in the literature. The first gap is the inadequate way in which cultural competence has been measured as a predictor for tourist victimization. Two variables are presented in the article that help resolve this problem. Place of residency is an ordinal variable that can distinguish among Catalan, Spanish and foreign tourists, when usual variables measuring tourist origin are dichotomous. Number of past visits to Barcelona gauges the prior knowledge of Barcelona that tourists have, so that their capability of knowing their way around and staying out of dangerous places—thus reducing their exposure to victimization—can be taken into consideration, something rarely done in the literature. The second gap is the little importance afforded time as a key predictor of tourist victimization by the specialized literature. This article uses days in destination in order to gauge the exposure to victimization generated by spending days in the tourist destination, carrying valuables around and patronizing hardly defensible places full of anonymous people. The Chi-squared tests and univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses presented here show that these variables might be valuable predictors of criminal victimization among tourists and thus deserve further testing and theoretical development in future work.