Perceived risk of victimization and fear of crime: a case study of METU students

Download

index.pdf

Date

2011

Author

Gökulu, Gökhan

Metadata

Show full item record

Item Usage Stats

347
views

142
downloads

Fear of crime is a phenomenon which affects individuals' standard of living and influences their everyday behaviors. In this sense, it can be said that if a person has high fear of crime, this will have a negative effect on his or her standard of living. Fear of crime does not always bear resemblance to the crime rate of the society. From this standpoint, residents of a region where crime rate is high do not always have high fear of crime. Similarly, the residents of a region where crime rate is low may have high fear of crime. This situation points out the need of an extensive analysis on fear of crime as a significant variable regarding individuals' standard of living. This study aims to examine the relationship between perceived risk of victimization and fear of crime. Studies about fear of crime mainly focus on gender differences, social inequalities and physical incivilities. all of this factor are important element to grasp its nature and dimensions of fear of crime. In addition to this factors fear of crime is affected by individuals risk perception of victimization. Our study aims to deal fear of crime concept among students in a multidimensional approach. In this respect, it will evaluate how much the students are afraid of and uncomfortable with being exposed to a crime rather than the assessing merely the possibility of being exposed to a crime. The study will measure the concept of fear of crime over the concept of anticipated fear according to Ferraro’s (1995) model. The advantage of this approach is that it allows the measurement of fear of crime the individuals show as a result of contacting other person and environment rather than the instantaneous fears. Our study will evaluate the Metu students’ fear of crime in terms of specific crimes rather than a general evaluation of crime in line with the approach of risk perception. In this sense, our study seeks to measure the fear of crime over certain crimes such as theft, robbery, simple attack, serious attack and sexual abuse.

Subject Keywords

Sociology., Crime prevention.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12613830/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/20757

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

A study of fear of crime in two districts of Ankara Çetin, Didem; Mutlu, Kayhan; Department of Sociology (2010) The purpose of this study is to understand the fear of crime in the society. The studies in the literature, which focus on sociology of crime in general and the fear of crime in particular, were carried out within the social dynamics of other countries, and mostly the western societies. In this sense, it is clear that there is a need to make evaluations that specifically address our society. In this study, it was aimed to achieve a holistic analysis of fear of crime, based on the question “what are the fact...
Addressing Fear of Crime in Public Space: Gender Differences in Reaction to Safety Measures in Train Transit Yavuz, Nilay (2010-11-01) Research has identified several factors that affect fear of crime in public space. However, the extent to which gender moderates the effectiveness of fear-reducing measures has received little attention. Using data from the Chicago Transit Authority Customer Satisfaction Survey of 2003, this study aims to understand whether train transit security practices and service attributes affect men and women differently. Findings indicate that, while the presence of video cameras has a lower effect on women's feelin...
Spatio-temporal crime prediction model based on analysis of crime clusters Polat, Esra; Düzgün, H. Şebnem; Department of Geodetic and Geographical Information Technologies (2007) Crime is a behavior disorder that is an integrated result of social, economical and environmental factors. In the world today crime analysis is gaining significance and one of the most popular subject is crime prediction. Stakeholders of crime intend to forecast the place, time, number of crimes and crime types to get precautions. With respect to these intentions, in this thesis a spatio-temporal crime prediction model is generated by using time series forecasting with simple spatial disaggregation approach...
Crime prevention strategies for Turkish cities through spatial crime analysis: a case study of Keçiören Yavuzer, İpek; Düzgün, H. Şebnem; Işık, Oğuz; Department of Geodetic and Geographical Information Technologies (2013) The place-based crime prevention notion comes from the idea that the human behavior is influenced by the environment, so it is possible to prevent crime before it happens by controlling and managing the environment with a proper design. To create a more secure environment and better quality of life, it is necessary to analyze the physical and nonphysical factors that affect crime victimization in order to develop crime prevention strategies. In the thesis, a spatial model is developed to analyze the physica...
The impact of social capital on crime: Evidence from the Netherlands Akçomak, İbrahim Semih (2012-01-01) This research shows that social capital is important in explaining why crime is so heterogeneous across space. Social capital is considered as a latent construct composed of a variety of indicators, such as blood donations, voter turnout, voluntary contributions to community well-being, and trust. To isolate exogenous variation in social capital, three historical variables are used as instruments: the fraction of foreigners, the number of schools and the fraction of Protestants in 1859. The historical infor...

Citation Formats

G. Gökulu, “ Perceived risk of victimization and fear of crime: a case study of METU students ,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2011.