The present article examines the key concepts underlying victimization theories (i.e., exposure, proximity, target attractiveness, guardianship). Measures of each concept are developed and evaluated in terms of their ability to explain individuals' risks of residential burglary, personal theft, and personal violence. Using data from 5,271 respondents in the British Crime Survey, mixed empirical support is found for the structural-choice model underlying current victimization theories. Specifically, the structural components of these theories (proximity and exposure) are more consistently related to victimization experiences than the target-selection or choice components (attractiveness and guardianship). Multiplicative models that test for interaction among these major variables also produce results that are contrary to theoretical productions. The authors conclude that present theories do not adequately describe individuals' risks of victimization and discuss some alternative directions for future research on criminal victimization.

No abstract

No abstract

Theoretical and empirical work concerning socioeconomic status (SES) and delinquency has mainly been devoted, throughout the past decade, to specifying the conditions under which SES and delinquency are likely to be highly related. Three broad categories of conditions, with 12 particular subconditions, have been hypothesized as specijiers of the SES/delinquency relationshb. Here, we review the recent empirical literature as it bears on these potential specifications. The results do not support any of the conditional hypotheses about SES and delinquency, and they again challenge the idea that a negative SES/delinquency relationship is general and pervasive. Almost all of the recent research finds some condition under which SES and delinquency are significantly related, however, and several of the specijication hypotheses have not been thoroughly enough investigated to permit firm conclusions about their potency. This poses a quandary for scholars trying to understand delinquent behavior. Possible responses to the situation are discussed.It is no overstatement that the relationship between social class and criminal behavior is one of the most important and perennial issues in the sociology of crime. The centrality of the dispute is undeniable and on its resolution presumably hinges the fate of many theories of crime and delinquency (but see Tittle, 1983). An apparently simple question-What is the relationship between social class and criminality?-has generated a large research literature, but the results of empirical investigations are inconsistent. The relationship is said to be positive (direct), negative (inverse), conditional, or some combination of the three. Different studies have used different samples, measures of social class, measures of delinquency or crime, and analytic procedures, and some of the discrepant findings are attributable to those different methodologies. But regardless of the conceptual or methodological reasons, criminologists seem no closer to resolving the issue and identifying the nature of the relationship than 50 years ago.Most criminological data collected prior to the 1950s seemed to demonstrate strong SES differences between delinquents and nondelinquents. Indeed, the existence of a negative relationship between SES and delinquency was accepted as fact by most social scientists, and it became the basis for several theories of delinquency. But not all scholars accepted this conventional wisdom uncritically. Some observed that the official data on which the CRIMINOLOGY VOLUME 28 NUMBER 2 1990 271 212 TITTLE AND MEIER SES/delinquency correlation was based could be biased because much delinquency was hidden from official view and those hidden acts might have been more equally distributed among the various social strata than the officially known acts. But real controversy about an SES/delinquency relationship did not emerge until self-report studies became common. Early self-report research by Nye and Short (1957;Nye et al., 1958) suggested that there was no statistically significant ...

No abstract