Exploring fear of crime from a socio-psychological perspective : comparison between Chinese and Maltese University students

Abstract

The phenomenon of fear of crime has been a worldwide problem for decades. Researchers from various fields, including criminology, sociology and psychology, have been struggling to find out why people tend to have a high level of fear of crime that even tend to be more serious than the problem of crime itself. This paper is interested in exploring fear of crime from a socio-psychological perspective. From an investigation conducted among Chinese university students in China and university students in the University of-Malta, it was evidenced that gender differences, the perceived likelihood of victimization, perceived incivility and people's broader socio-cultural beliefs all have great impacts among Chinese and Maltese university students. Other factors such as financial level, criminal victimizations, the media and perceived vulnerability including perceived consequences and personal control tend to become influential once being interacted with each other. Finally the integrated socio-psychological models were found to explain nearly half variance in the fear of crime among Chinese respondents and more than half variance among Maltese respondents. However, due to the nature of the participants, some salient variables were missing in the study, thus the investigation failed to present a holistic view in the understanding of the fear of crime.