‘Diffuse anxiety’: the role of economic insecurity in predicting fear of crime

Abstract

Past research on fear of crime has focused on variables from the victimization/vulnerability, neighborhood disadvantage, and community control models. Recent theoretical work on fear of crime also suggests the importance of ‘diffuse anxieties’ in elevating personal fear of crime and creating a ‘culture of fear’ in American society. Diffuse anxieties include concern about the economy, big government, welfare, union-led inflation and affirmative action. To date, few studies have empirically tested the relationship between diffuse anxiety and fear of crime. This exploratory study, conducted during the recent economic recession in the USA, tests the role of economic insecurity in predicting crime fear, while controlling for measures of crime vulnerability, neighborhood disorder and community control. Results indicate that economic insecurity is an important predictor of fear of crime and the implications of this finding are discussed.

Keywords:

• fear of crime
• economic insecurity
• collective efficacy

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Michele Johnson and my Research Methods in Law and Justice students for their assistance with data collection, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

1. It should be noted that the term diffuse anxiety has also been used in a number of studies by criminologists/psychologists to differentiate a lower frequency and intensity of emotional response related to abstract concern or anxiety about crime from a more heightened response related to a concrete mental state typically thought of as a fear of crime (Farrall and Gadd 2004, Gray et al. 2008, 2011, Hough 2004). The term is not unrelated to the diffuse anxieties discussed by Garland (2001), as clarified in a theoretical explanation by Farrall et al. (2007) who suggest that diffuse anxiety about crime has a non-recursive relationship with several other diffuse anxieties.

2. This unconventional sample generation method was utilized in an effort to (1) involve students in the process, (2) generate a large and diverse sample, and (3) eliminate the cost of purchasing a dataset.

3. Students were encouraged to include individuals outside their fellow student contacts to increase the diversity and variability of the sample. The students were not given extra-credit for providing these e-mails, but did use the entire dataset for their end of the quarter Research Methods projects.

4. A separate analysis with the entire sample yielded similar results.

5. In addition to variations in the perceptions that are measured, several fear of crime measures also differ in the level of reference that they use (Ferraro and LaGrange 1987). Questions can be ‘general’ and measure risk, concern, worry or fear for others, or they can be specific and targeted at the self. Add to this the fact that many measures never mention fear or crime in the questions, and sorting through empirical results becomes increasingly difficult. Ideally, fear of crime measures should measure emotions (fear specific), be personal (directed toward the self) and be crime specific (Ferraro and LaGrange 1987). This is not to understate the value of many of the other purported fear of crime measures. In fact, Ferraro (1995) argues that risk and safety measures are one of the best predictors of the emotion of fear.

6. It should be noted that in the past 10 years several alternate measures of fear of crime have been suggested, which include worry about crime, as well as measures of intensity and frequency of crime fear/worry (Farrall and Gadd 2004, Gray et al. 2008). Validity tests of these measures indicate that more traditional fear measures, such as the ones in this study, tend to overestimate fear levels (Farrall and Gadd 2004, Gray et al. 2008). Additionally, researchers are beginning to use measures of the three dimensions of vulnerability in their fear models (Killias and Clerici 2000; Jackson 2005, 2009). Using economic inequality to predict fear of crime using measures that are consistent with much of the literature referenced in this article (and still widely used and accepted in the research) allows for greater comparability between studies.

7. As mentioned in the literature review, numerous studies have shown a positive correlation between age and fear of crime (Clemente and Kleiman 1977, Jaycox 1978, Lewis and Salem 1986, Ferraro 1995), but the majority of these studies use a variation of the non-crime-specific hypothetical question ‘how safe would you feel walking within one mile of your home at night’?

8. It should be noted that not all fear is considered superfluous and that in some cases fear of crime may create positive consequences. For an explanation of ‘functional fear’ and a review of the literature in this area, see Jackson and Gray (2010).