Fear of crime, security perception and preventive behavior
Fear of crime, security perception and preventive behavior

Summary/Abstract: The presented study analyses the social and personal predictors of the perception of safety, as a cognitiveemotional image of safety conditions in a defined living space of an individual. There is no consensus on the definition and measurement of security as a dependent variable. Particular tools are used to monitor the risk of victimization, fear of crime and preventive behavior. The aim of the study is to analyse the effect of vulnerability, victimization and contextual variables (ethnic threat, neighborhood issues) on the security perception, fear of crime, and preventive behavior in Slovakia. The second goal was to verify the impact of other psychological constructs – the need for structure, self-control, and conservatism – on these dependent variables. The sample consists of 1,447 respondents from Slovakia. The research design of the study consists of the 6 regression models. For each dependent variable (3) 2 models were created – with and without the presence of psychological factors. In all the models, the same variables were used to compare the predictor power. The presented results show that the variables of Vulnerability and previous Direct Victimization had a significant impact on the security perception. Ethnic Threats was also significant. From the psychological predictors, the SelfControl and Conservatism were significant. However, in relation to security perception, Age, Neighborhood Problems and Need for Structure have been demonstrated as not significant. The regression analysis results of the Fear of crime brought a different structure of significant predictors compared to the security perception. In relation to Fear of crime, the predictors of Age, Victimization, and Ethnic Threats were not significant. However, Neighborhood Problems were highly significant. All the psychological predictors monitored contributed to the explanation of the Fear of crime. Preventive behavior was most predicted by previous victimization as well as Age and Gender. Predictors of preventive behavior are more personality characteristics of respondents than contextual ones. Despite the low explanatory value of both models, there is a completely different structure of predictors of preventive behavior compared to safety perceptions and fear of crime. While gender is a universal predictor of all models, age was only relevant for preventive behavior. The predominant predictor of preventive behavior as well as perceived safety is the previous victimization of the respondent, which does not apply to fear of crime. The results of the study confirmed a different structure of the predictors of security perception, fear of crime, as well as preventive behavior. Almost all the traditionally studied predictors were significant for the security perception. It has been confirmed that vulnerable groups, particularly women, the elderly, respondents from larger cities, and the victimized are more likely to have a lower level of security perception; which corresponds to a number of findings that repeatedly confirm the significant impact of the vulnerability factors on the security perception. Also, problems in the neighborhood, such as vandalism, graffiti and rubbish, were a significant predictor on an individual level. For the respondents, areas with an increased concentration of neighborhood issues are an indicator of the absence of social control. Similarly, the negative perception of immigrants may be caused by a tendency to associate the members of immigrant groups with the specific forms of violent crimes, but also with economic threats, such as competition in the labor market, housing, or burden on social security systems. Although the impact of the psychological variables on the security perception was significant, their total contribution to the amount of the variance explained was negligible (2.4%). However, using the same predictors for the fear of crime, their value reached 10.2%. Fear of crime was explained more by the individual’s characteristics than the contextual variables. Exceptions were Age and Victimization. While age is known to have no linear relation to the perception of security, the experience with crime produces contradictory findings. It is therefore clear that the security perception and the fear of crime are closely related and are saturated with similar predictors, but they are not identical constructs. In the case of preventive behavior, we have noticed a very small proportion of the explained variance, indicating the causality of non-traditional predictors. Preventive behavior in this context appears to be a significantly different construct as compared to the security perception and fear of crime. The question of the impact of other psychological constructs on the preventive behavior remains open.

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