Fear of crime has emerged as a significant social issue. Survey research suggests that it has significantly increased since the mid 1960s and it has become a significant component of the stresses, strains, and health of contempory urban life. Causal research is very limited. For the most part, it has focused on the extent and distribution of fear across social statuses, such as age, sex, class, race, etc. Our research takes a different direction; it treats fear as a social fact which varies across sites and situations. It examines the extent to which the structural characteristics of cities, such as crime rates, the proportion of crime which is interracial, racial composition (percent non-white and segregation), population size, age composition, and crime coverage in the mass media affect the fear of crime among different age categories; and the extent to which both fear and these structural characteristics constrain people's social and economic behavior. The sample is drawn from the 26 cities used in the National Crime Survey. Data on the fear of crime and on people's economic and social behavior are obtained from interviews of approximately 10,000 households per city; and data on the structural characteristics will be collected from a variety of sources, including the Uniform Crime Reports, and the U.S. Census. The analysis will consist of specifying and estimating a series of structural equations.
