Religiosity and Fear of Crime Victimization

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this study, we developed three hypotheses about the role of religiosity in fear of crime victimization. Noting that religiosity and fear of victimization vary significantly by gender, we also examined to what extent religiosity affects fear of victimization by gender. We utilized Wave 2 of the Chapman University fear study. We developed three measures of religiosity: salience, service attendance, and biblical literalism. We used factor analysis to develop four indices of crime victimization: general violent crime; known offender; stranger; and property. We provide correlation and full-model OLS regression results. Biblical literalism is positively correlated with all measures of property crime. Moreover, when separated by gender, we find that the correlations are consistent for females only. In the full models with statistical controls, we find that literalism still has a positive effect on fear of crime victimization measures. However, tests for gender by religiosity interactions were not present in the full models. We further explored interactions between religiosity and neighborhood context and found that biblical literalism increases fear in neighborhoods with above-average crime presence but for female respondents only. Implications for theory and research are discussed.