The rationale of research

Despite the fact that crime has been decreasing within UK, according to Crime Survey for England and Wales data on incident rates from year 2009 to year ending June 2020 (Stripe, 2020), fear of crime continues to be a highly discussed subject. Fear of crime as defined by Ferraro & LaGrange (1987) is a situation where people develop negative emotional reactions when they are exposed directly or indirectly to circumstance that lead to crime or symbols that are related to crime. Several studies confirmed that fear of crime has a negative impact on people’s psychological health (Ferraro & LaGrange, 1987; Stafford et al., 2007; Lorenc et al., 2013; Macassa et al., 2018). Additionally, Lorenc et al. (2013), in their study based on the relation between fear of crime and the environment within UK, argue that fear of crime have a detrimental effect on peoples’ health and wellbeing.

The rationale of research:

Over the years, media serve as a major source of information related to crime and continues to occupy a huge amount of discussion about the impact of it upon each individual. Starting from Gerbner & Gross (1976) theory of cultivation, where they confirmed that the longer exposure on TV violence inspire fear of crime, there’s been various interpretations of the theory with mixed results. The impact of media and exposure to crime news has been found to be strongly correlated with fear of crime (Chiricos et al., 1997; Romer & Jamieson, 2014; Mrazek, 2015). However, multiple studies have questioned the relationship between media and fear of crime (Gross & Adday, 2003; Dowler, 2003; Ditton, 2004; Chadee et al., 2019; Yamamoto et al., 2019) and argues that the possible effects of media upon fear of crime depends on other factors as well (Intravia et al., 2017; Haara et al., 2018). The evolution of communication technology has had a huge impact on the way individuals receive, interpret and evaluate information related to crime. Therefore, more extensive and relevant research based around the initial theory presented is needed.   Yamamoto et al. (2019), found a weak, almost null correlation between media and fear of crime and highlighted the fact that people who often communicate and establish friendly relationships with their neighbours would fear less and will pay less attention to crime news. However, Yamamoto et al. (2019), didn’t confirm a definite result due to their high number of limitations. They explained that several variables need improvement on how they’ve been measured, reason why validity concern has been raised. The media type variable wasn’t distinguished very well and fear of crime was measured using a single item (Yamamoto et al., 2019).  Previous research has shown that anxiety is related to both fear of crime and media (Mrazek, 2015; Ditton, 2004), however, very little research has examined the relationship between level of anxiety and media consumption affecting fear of crime.

As discussed above, prior research has shown multiple potential contributors in fear of crime. The present study aims to build on the limited research on the relationship between media and fear of crime. Moreover, the present study will seek to understand the link between fear of crime and anxiety, and will focus on the influence of anxiety on both fear of crime and media as previously suggested (Maddison, 2018; Mrazek, 2015; Shoulders, 2020).