Media, neighborhood conditions, and terrorism risk: what triggers fear of terrorism?

Fear is an emotional personal response to crime and symbols evoking crime. Criminologists have long endeavored to explain how and why crime (and fear as a response) exists in societies. Fear of terrorism is a relatively more specific degree of fear of crime, however terrorism fear is an understudied topic within criminology, and its correlates need to be explored in the light of what is currently known about fear of traditional crimes. Extant literature suggests that fear of crime may result from individual differences, neighborhood conditions (environmental context and level of crime in neighborhoods). It is also argued the mass media influence the level of fear. Besides, there is a gap in the literature on spatial aspect of fear. Do the people fearful of terrorism live in places of actual terrorist incidents? Drawing on the individual perceptions of local conditions and the prevalence of the actual crime (terrorism), the basic purpose of the dissertation is to examine fear of terrorism at various levels (individual and neighborhood) in Istanbul. The focus is on four main points: (1) the relationship between the neighborhood context and its residents` fear of terrorism, (2) a possible overlap between neighborhoods with terrorism risk in space and their residents` levels of fear (3) the impact of the media on fear of terrorism, controlling for other correlates, (4) the comparison of terrorism fear to the fear of traditional crimes. Three datasets are used for this purpose: (1) a cross-sectional survey of a random sample of 1874 residents, (2) incident summaries of terrorist acts committed between 2008 and 2012, (3) geo-referenced datasets on infrastructure. The results suggest that certain social (e.g., subcultural diversity), environmental (e.g., disorder), and individual (e.g., gender) factors remain significant predictors of crime fear while terrorism fear is associated with the extent to which participants consume terrorism related media coverage. Policy implications and future directions are discussed in the thesis.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Ismail Ona