Income inequality and fear of crime across the European region
Abstract
This paper aims to take a holistic approach on studying fear of crime by testing predictors at multiple levels of analyses. Data from the European Social Survey (N = 56,752 from 29 countries) were used to test and extend the Income Inequality and Sense of Vulnerability Hypotheses. The findings confirm that (1) individuals in societies with greater income inequalities are more fearful of crime, and (2) older or disabled people as well as women report greater fear of crime. Contrary to the hypotheses, ethnic majority and not ethnic minority members report greater fear of crime, if they reside in high income inequality countries. It is further demonstrated that fear of crime explains the inverse association between income inequality and subjective well-being in this particular subsample.
Citation
Vauclair , C-M & Bratanova , B 2017 , ' Income inequality and fear of crime across the European region ' , European Journal of Criminology , vol. 14 , no. 2 , pp. 221-241 . https://doi.org/10.1177/1477370816648993
Publication
European Journal of Criminology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1477-3708Type
Journal article
Rights
(c) The authors. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Description
Funding for this study was provided by a Marie Curie Fellowship (PIRG08-GA-2010-276809) to the first author.Collections
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