Article Concerns About Crime for Self and Others: An Analysis of Individual and Contextual Effects

The purpose of this study was to examine how individual- and contextual-level factors affect both personal concerns about crime and concerns about crime for one’s spouse or significant other, family, and friends. We were also interested in whether and how these factors differed by gender. We combined individual-level data from a telephone survey of U.S. adults (N 1,207) with contextual-level data from the U.S. Census, the American Community Survey, and the Uniform Crime Reports. We found that respondents were more concerned about crime for others than for themselves. Results from our ordered logit models showed that concerns about crime for self and others were greater for respondents who felt less safe from crime and for respondents who used constrained behaviors. Personal concerns about crime were greater for women and con-cerns about crime for one’s spouse or significant other were greater for men. Contextual-level factors had little or no effect on concerns about crime. Regarding concerns about crime for one’s self and one’s spouse or significant other, there were also important differences by gender. For example, weapons behaviors mattered only for women and quality of life mattered only for men. Keywords fear of crime, criminal victimization, gender and crime/justice, quantitative methods Research on fear of crime has focused primarily on personal fear, or fear for oneself. Studies have shown that personal fear varies across demographic groups (e.g., women are more fearful than men