Investigating the Relationship between Social and Cultural Capitals and Fear of Crime among Elderly People in Shiraz

Fear of crime is fundamentally an emotional reaction accompanied with danger and anxiety. This phenomenon is not necessarily a real fear and it could be an expected one. Theoretically, women and the elderly are more exposed to crime, and based on the valid documents, they have a higher fear of crime than others, because they are more vulnerable. Fear of crime as a social construct is affected by several factors and it seems that it could be additionally influenced by social and cultural capitals. When people get aged, they normally experience an unwelcome decrease in social networks that results from retirement, loneliness, or losing spouse. All of these experiences lead to the decline of social support. Accordingly, social isolation, and smaller social networks bring about fear of crime among the elderly people. Furthermore, having cultural capital means increasing information and cognitive potency. Naturally, growing information and cognitive strength equip individuals with some needed capabilities and skills for facing everyday life problems like fear of crime, because they are more able than others to distinguish the problem and to find suitable solutions for encountering them. As a result, the main goal of this research is to investigate the relationship between social and cultural capitals with fear of crime among the elderly people in Shiraz.

This cross-sectional survey was carried out on 330 aged people over 65 years old in Shiraz who have been selected by using the multi-stage random sampling method. In order to measure fear of crime, a researcher-made questionnaire was used. This questionnaire included two dimensions of fear of persons and fear of properties, and had 10 items. The respondents were told to respond whether they have recently felt fear of crime in the following items: extortion, assault, street annoyance, threat, insult, theft, fraud, defalcation, vandalism, and pick pocketing. The measurement was a dichotomous nominal type of yes=1 and no=0 and thus the range was between 0 and 1. For measuring the social capital, the questionnaire of social capital developed by Onyx and Bullen (2000) was utilized. This questionnaire was used earlier in Iran and its psychological properties had been calculated. Finally, for the assessment of the cultural capital, a researcher-made questionnaire including three dimensions of embedded, objectified, and institutionalized cultural capitals with 15 items were applied. For measuring the validity and the reliability, content validity and Kuder-Richardson coefficient were applied respectively.
 

Based on the descriptive findings of the research, most of the participants in terms of gender, employment, education, ethnicity, marital status, were male, retired, less than diploma, Fars, and living without spouse, respectively. Moreover, the findings showed that, the pick pocketing (59.4%), insults (57%), and fraud (56.7%) were the most frequent, and extortion (15.8%) was the least frequent of fear of crime among the respondents. On the other hand, the inferential research findings using structural equation modeling (SEM) by Amos software indicated that social capital statistically has a significant effect on fear of crime but there is no significant relationship between cultural capital and fear of crime. It should be mentioned that the independent variables in general, were able to explain 0.14 of the variance of the dependent variable of fear of crime. Among the demographic variables, age, sex, and education showed a significant effect on fear of crime so that fear of crime among women was more than men, with going up the age, fear of crime increased, and finally the more education the elderly had, the less fear of crime they would experience. Based on the results, although the significant effect of social capital on fear of crime on the theoretical framework was totally predictable, the lack of significant effect of cultural capital on fear of crime was unforeseeable. For justifying this research finding, some considerations must be regarded. First, according to some scholars, in some situations the cultural capital is used as an exhibition of property, lifestyle, and behavior so those well-off situations are shown to others for getting affirmation. In such a frame, cultural capital increases fear of crime instead of decreasing it. Second, as it was mentioned earlier, cultural capital means increasing the cognitive potency. Therefore, the more the elderly have cultural capital, the more they are able to understand the problems and difficulties of the society like the youth unemployment, inflation, poverty, social pathologies and so on. As a result, they feel more fear of crime. Third, after controlling the demographic variable of gender, it turned out that the score of the cultural capital among women is significantly more than men. Also, women are weaker than men physically and feel fear of crime automatically more than men. This research finding, showing the lack of the significant effect of cultural capital on fear of crime, is justified.