Recent research addressing fear of crime largely concerns the causes of that fear; this article expands our understanding of fear of crime by examining whether people cope with their fear individually or collectively. Our guiding questions were two: Do coping strategies differ by those individual‐level characteristics established in the fear‐of‐crime literature? And do strategies differ based upon conceptually distinct types of fear? This research, based on a 1995 telephone survey of a random sample of New Orleans residents, suggests that the answer to both questions is yes. Commodified, individual‐level precautionary techniques are explained primarily by characteristics that reflect differential abilities to pay for such precautions. Conversely, collective‐level coping strategies are predicted primarily by degree of affective fear based on emotional reactions, regardless of actual levels of victimization.
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Reid et al. (1998) studied this question.
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