Abstract
Social behavior can be troubled by the constant concern of crime. Research on the relationship between traditional media crime exposure, social media crime videos, and fear about the crime is scarce. The present study is designed to investigate whether social media exposure, TV news crime viewing, crime drama exposure is directly or indirectly associated to fear about crime. The theoretical framework of the study is based on the mediated fear model and cultivation theory. A sample of 371 university students was selected through a convenience sampling technique. SPSS 25 was used to analyze the data and Model 4 of Process Macro was used to examine the mediating role of the cognitive component of fear of crime (perceived seriousness, perceived risk, and perceived control). The results show that television news crime viewing, crime drama, and social media crime video exposure is positively associated with fear about crime. Moreover, three cognitive components of fear of crime played a mediatory role between traditional media exposure and fear of crime. In addition to this, the relationship between social media crime video exposure and fear about crime was mediated by the cognitive component of fear of crime.
Highlights
Crime related stories are an irrefutable aspect of media today
The results show that television news crime viewing, crime drama, and social media crime video exposure is positively associated with fear about crime
Perceived risk was insignificantly positively related to perceived control while significantly related to fear about crime
Summary
Crime related stories are an irrefutable aspect of media today. Previous studies have shown a positive relationship between television news viewing and concern about the crime under the framework of cultivation theory (Custers and Van den Bulck, 2013; Romer et al, 2003). The indirect link among television and fear about crime has been explored in many studies (Custers and Van den Bulck, 2013;2015), but little attention has been paid that how exposure to social media crime videos is directly and indirectly associated with fear about crime. Cognitive factors of fear of crime played a mediatory role between the relationship of exposure and concern of crime. Fewer studies have kept their focus on university students because several studies took the adult as their participants (Grabe and Drew, 2007; Kort-Butler and Hartshorn, 2011). It is necessary to study this part of the population because they spend more time on different media platforms (Rideout et al, 2010) and media helps them to build their ideas, beliefs, values and thinking patterns (Arnett, 2007)
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