Street Traffic, Social Integration, and Fear of Crime (A Methodological Review) (From Link Between Crime and the Built Environment, Volume 2, P C237-C244, 1980, by Tetsuro Motoyama et al - See NCJ-79544)

• NCJ Number: 79560
• Author(s): T Motoyama; S Shore; H Rubenstein; P Hartjens
• Date Published: 1980
• Length: 8 pages
• Corporate Author: American Institutes for Research
• Sale Source: National Institute of Justice/
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Available on microfiche from NCJRS as NCJ-79544.

Annotation

This review assesses an evaluation by T. Baumer and A. Hunter on the relative significance and interaction of residents' perceptions of street traffic and local social integration, and of their fear of criminal victimization.

Abstract

The study was motivated by the belief that previous studies that investigated the relationship between physical design characteristics and crime underestimate the degree to which social variables affect crime and the fear of crime. The study used data collected from the Hartford Demonstration Program in Connecticut (Fowler et al., 1978). The original data source included 556 interviews with a random sample of residents in the experimental area, census tracts adjacent to the experimental area, and the remainder of Hartford. The study sought correlations among perceptions of street traffic, assessments of social integration and stability, and residents' fear of crime. The study concluded that the greater the perceived density of people on city streets, the greater the fear of criminal victimization. This finding is qualified by the fact that the positive relationship found between fear of crime and the perceived volume of street traffic is much less than the strength of the relationship found between fear of crime and other individual and community-level characteristics, such as age, sex, race, and class. No positive relationship was found to exist between street traffic and fear of crime when residents were socially integrated into their local community. These conclusions appear overdrawn for the following reasons: (1) the study's model was not compared to completing models or plausible alternative explanations for the relationships between social and physical variables and the fear of crime; (2) the validity of the social integration and stability variables is questionable; and (3) the social integration and stability variables were dichotomized, and this may have changed the value of Kendall's tau.