Robbery victimization among Asian Americans: a comparison with White and Black Americans

Abstract

Asian Americans remain understudied in criminological research yet they are as likely as non-Asians to be victims of robbery. Drawing upon the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) 1992–2005 data, this study compares and contrasts the risk factors of robbery victimization among Asian, White, and Black Americans. Compared to Whites and Blacks, there is a more visible link between education and robbery risks for Asians. Employment is not significantly related to robbery victimization for Whites or Blacks, but is associated with higher risks for Asians. For Whites and Blacks, urban residence is related to significantly higher likelihoods of robbery victimization yet for Asian Americans, urban placement of robbery experience is not identified. Implications for future research and policy are discussed.

Keywords:

• robbery victimization
• Asian Americans
• race
• lifestyle/routine activity theory
• NCVS

Notes

 1. The term ‘Asian Americans' used in this study includes both Asians and Pacific Islanders following conventional practices (Jang et al. 1991). The US Census Bureau and other governmental agencies frequently use the racial category of ‘Asian and Pacific Islander.’ The NCVS data used for this study treated ‘Asian and Pacific Islander’ as one racial category during the period of 1992–2002 and separated categories during the period of 2003–2005.

 2. Although commonly classified as a type of violent crime, robbery is also viewed as an instrumental crime, representing a goal-seeking behavior committed for explicit, future goals (Miethe and Drass 1999). The use of force or the threatening of use of force is instrumental to the goal of taking another person's property/money.

 3. For the 1992–2005 NCVS data, the non-victim data file is extremely large. Small sample size is not a concern; rather, it is important to ensure that the sample size is not too large, where an effect of little scientific importance is nevertheless statistically significant (Lenth 2001). In addition, there is a point of diminishing returns beyond which increasing sample size provides little benefit; therefore, a random sample of the person-level non-victim data was taken, which was sufficient and proper to be merged into the victim data to examine risk factors for robbery.

 4. The use of subsamples produced coefficients that were consistent with those obtained from full samples, but standard errors were somewhat larger due to the reduced sample size.

 5. When counts are dichotomized, all positive counts are treated as if they are equivalent, which is usually not the case in reality. Among robbery victims, some are repeat victims, while others are one-time victims.

 6. The values of the deviances and the Pearson Chi-squares divided by their respective degrees of freedom suggested that there might be some overdispersion, especially for the model of robbery victimization among Black Americans.

 7. The following equation is used to test for significant differences between parameter estimates in models for Asians and Whites and in models for Asians and Blacks: t = b1 – b2/√SEb1² + SEb2².