Over the last 15 years the fear of crime, particularly among the aged, has emerged as a significant social and research problem. My original research focused on three issues: 1. developing a macro model of fear of crime, which examines variation in fear between cities and how it is affected by the social structure of cities; 2. developing a micro model of fear, which examines the relative effects of individual status characteristics and city structural characteristics on variation in fear among individuals; 3. examining the reciprocal effects of fear and social disengagement at both the micro and macro levels. All models were analyzed by age, as I expected the underlying social psychological processes to be contingent on age. The analysis used the National Crime Survey data merged with data on city structural characteristics taken from various other sources. The proposed extension is designed to further specify and explain a set of powerful findings, which show that the effect of social statuses on fear and the reciprocal effects of fear and social disengagement are contingent on age. The status model breaks down for people over age 70. My research proposes to further specify the status-age contingency effect by finer graduations of age, which requires drawing a larger sample of the aged from the NCS, and then to test two distinct explanations of the effect, which requires collecting more information from NCS and further multivariate analyses.
