Scholars are paying close attention to incivilities and how they affect citizens' fear of crime. A common research finding is that neighborhood incivilities (e.g., abandoned storefronts, unkept lots, litter, noise, bench sleepers, public drunks) are often as powerful in generating feelings of fear as crime itself. The implication is that by removing the riffraff from the streets and graffiti from the walls, feelings of fear will be reduced. Moreover, community “clean-sweeps” will meet with public approval as they improve the overall quality of life in cities and neighborhoods. This article carefully examines the influence of a number of social and physical incivilities on two different reactions to crime—perceptions of risk and feelings of fear. The authors use a national data set of 1,101 randomly selected U.S. adults who have been interviewed by telephone. The data reveal significant relationships between social and physical incivility and perceptions of risk; incivility is also related to fear but less strongly so. To the extent that incivility is predictive of fear, its causal effect is mediated almost entirely through perceptions of risk to crime. This finding has received little attention to date.

Much of the research on fear of crime indicates that women and older persons are highly afraid of crime. These findings, especially older persons' fear of crime, are widely communicated in the scientific and popular media. This study examines age and gender differences in perceived risk and fear of crime. The data are from telephone interviews of 320 randomly selected residents in a southeastern metropolitan area of the United States. The relationships of age and gender to fear of crime are compared using a National Crime Survey (NCS) measure of fear of crime and 11 alternative indicators of fear of specific offenses. Women reported signifcantly greater perceived risk and fear of crime than men regardless of how fear of crime was measured and older adults reported the greatest fear of crime when the NCS measure was used. but not when the alternative individual measures of fear of crime were used. A LISREL model with latent constructs for fear of personal crime and fear of property crime also indicates that older adults do not have higher levels of fear of crime. In short, the extent of fear in the everyday lives of most older persons has been overestimated in many previous studies because of measurement problems.

The reasons why previous studies of fear of crime yield different conclusions regarding age differences are examined. Data from a national survey of adults are used to assess whether older adults manifest the highest levels of fear of crime. No significant relationship was found between age and the commonly used indicators of fear of crime in many previous studies when controlling for relevant factors. Using an alternative strategy for measuring fear of crime--based upon rating fear for 10 different victimizations--reveals that younger persons are more likely than older persons to be afraid of most types of crime. Women score higher on fear for all victimizations considered. A LISREL analysis indicates that the 10 victimizations are best characterized as either personal or property crime and that older adults' scores on these dimensions are below the grand mean; persons 75 years or older have the lowest scores on fear of property crime. These results question the existence of the "victimization/fear paradox."

The present study tests the validity of a common‐cause model in explaining both serious substance use and serious delinquent behavior among youths. Longitudinal data on 441 male and 441 female adolescents are analyzed. Youths originally tested at Time 1 when they were 12, 15, or 18 years old were retested three years later when they were 15, 18, or 21 years old. The results provide modest support for a common‐cause model. While a number of predictor variables drawn from control theory and differential association theory are related to both behaviors, those drawn from the literature on psychological correlates of adolescent deviance tend to be more strongly related to subsequent serious substance use than to serious delinquency. The findings suggest that there is a degree of etiological independence in serious adolescent substance use and serious forms of delinquency. The implications of these results for theory development and policy implementation are discussed.

This study tests an integrated theoretical model of delinquency on a representative sample of 341 male New Jersey adolescents. The model is a modified version of Hirschi's control theory that integrates, in part, cultural deviance theory. This study addresses two questions: (1) how well does the theory explain delinquency within different adolescent age groups? and (2) does the salience of individual components in the model differ from one age group to another? Path analysis indicates that parameter estimates vary substantially across age groups The influence of parents and the school peak considerably in midadolescence while the influence of delinquent companions is greatest among the oldest male group. The findings indicate that the processes related to delinquency change considerably as youths age through adolescence, thus implying that the issue of “age generalizability” warrants greater attention than presently given in delinquency theory and research.