Ferraro examines how people interpret their risk of criminal victimization and identifies who is most likely to be afraid of crime. Although many previous studies of fear of crime do not explicitly consider the concept of risk or perceived risk in estimating the prevalence of fear, the approach taken here considers perceived risk as central to the entire interpretive process. It links national survey data on how people think about crime to official crime rates in America, and uses the comprehensive set of environmental and personal variables on a nationally representative sample to examine how fear develops for ten different types of crime.

Kenneth F. Ferraro is Professor of Sociology at Purdue University.