Poverty, Subculture of Violence, and Type of Homicide

Research on the causes of homicide has focused on two competing theoretical models, socioeconomic and subcultural. After a review of these two theoretical perspectives and a number of recent empirical studies of homicide derived from these perspectives, several theoretically derived hypotheses relating types of homicides as classified by the victim/offender relationship and these perspectives are presented and discussed. The analysis is designed to evaluate these hypotheses, and to address some of the discrepant findings in previous studies. The results indicate the importance of specification issues such as measurement and aggregation in understanding previous research, the primacy of the socioeconomic approach for understanding the causes of homicide, and the importance of further classification of homicide for disentangling potential subcultural effects from socioeconomic effects. Finally, a recommendation for further research on the subcultural approach is discussed.