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ABSTRACT
In this article, we propose that fear of crime has nonadditive and curvilinear effects on community engagement, and that this relationship varies by gender. We test our propositions utilizing the 2015 Chapman Survey of American Fears, Wave 2. We find that fear of crime has a linear positive relationship with community engagement for men. For women, we find a curvilinear relationship. At low and average levels of fear, there is a positive relationship between fear of crime and community engagement. At very high level of fear, there is a negative relationship. Implications for theory and research are discussed.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. We use the phrase gender to reference social gender- the binary version of gender used to classify the respondents in the survey (see Schlit Citation2010).
2. Other work suggests that the relationship between neighborhood characteristics and fear of crime can work in the opposite direction or as part of a feedback loop, wherein fear of crime both affects the qualities of the neighborhood and is itself influenced by those same characteristics (Markowitz et al. Citation2001).
3. Men are more likely to express fear of crime for others (e.g. wife, girlfriend, children, elderly parents) but not themselves (Rader and Haynes Citation2014).
4. This same research shows that men see volunteering as an extra-curricular career-building component of their paid work.
6. We managed missing cases with multiple imputation models for independent and control variables. Cases that were missing on the dependent variable were deleted from the analysis, as MI estimates of dependent variables are not warranted (Enders Citation2010). We used the SAS Proc MI Analyze procedure.
7. The negative binomial results are available upon request.
8. We explored reducing fear of crime into different dimensions (fear of violent crime, fear of property crime, etc.). We find the same results regardless of which method we use. We decided to retain the model with one dimension of fear of crime because this approach is consistent with the literature.
9. We did not test for these interactions as these findings are not directly related to our hypotheses.
10. In subsequent analyses, we find that both men and women in our sample have high odds of reporting that fear of crime has motivated them to purchase a gun, at average levels of fear of crime (men = 3.44 to 1; women = 2.86 to 1).
11. See Hawdon et al. (Citation2014).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
F. Carson Mencken
F. Carson Mencken is a professor of sociology and chair of the Department of Sociology at Baylor University. His research interests focus on the causes and consequences of civic engagement at the micro and macro levels.
Christopher D. Bader
Christopher D. Bader is a professor of sociology at Chapman University. His recent research focuses upon the management of stigma within deviant subcultures.
L. Edward Day
L. Edward Day is an associate professor of sociology at Chapman University. His research focuses upon the sociology of fear and how fears impact attitudes about crime and criminal justice.