FROM : Fear of Crime Among College Students with Disabilities

After we received your very helpful suggestions, we realized the scope of our initial submission was too broad.  Our central research question concerns the policy implications of the curious finding that students with disabilities are more fearful of criminal victimization during the day than their fellow students.  In short, our primary goal is to explore how universities and college administrators can implement policies and practices that work to ameliorate heightened daytime crime fears for students with disabilities and other vulnerable populations that share these concerns.  What we submitted strayed too far from that goal. 

 

In the current submission, we focus more clearly on the central research question and include quantitative analysis only to establish the continued significance of the finding upon which the policy analysis hinges.  We have removed analytic content related to the role of prior victimization on fear of crime for students with disability. While that question is an important one, it distracts from our larger goal and has since been well addressed elsewhere (see Daigle, 2024). 

 

 We also feel it important to share that we submitted the original article identifying this relationship to another journal in August of 2020 and despite repeated inquiries, the journal failed to review the submission citing its inability to find reviewers.  We made the decision to pull the article from that journal this spring and immediately resubmitted it to JSWWP.  In the intervening years, work by Daigle et al (2024) has confirmed the key finding this work is based upon (students with disabilities having greater daytime fear of crime).  We feel, given the validation of this finding, our goal to consider its implications is even more paramount.  We hope you agree.

 

 

Reviewer comment -1

 

1. English language needs to be improved as meaning of sentences are not clear in understanding.

We have revised the paper and have edited the manuscript to improve readability.  We expect you will find the new version has greater clarity.

 

2. Is there any difference between criminal victimization and victims of crime? If not then a single terminology should be used.

They are used as synonyms in the paper to avoid overuse of the single term ‘criminal victimization’.  

3. In a sentence of fear of crime paragraph, it is mentioned that age had no effect on fear of crime but in introduction paragraph it is written that as we age, our fear of crime or our anxiety about becoming a crime victim increases. These two statements are contradictory.

We have updated that section and removed the contradictory results.

 

4. In table 1, the data for ‘Violent Victimization’ is shifted by one column right. The figure for percentage of students with and without disabilities for different types of crime seems to be wrong.

Because of the renewed focus on policy, we have reduced the role of quantitative analysis in the paper, for that reason, consideration of the role of victimization has been removed.  Therefore, the related tables have been edited or removed.

 

5. In table 2, mean is expressed in terms of percentage (fraction out of 1). Therefore how standard deviation is much greater than mean is really confusing. It has to be rechecked.

 

Because consideration of the role of victimization has been removed from this analysis this table has been deleted.

 

6. In table 3, mean and standard deviation have to be written in separate columns. Also same calculation for mean as done in table 2 is also being noticed here.

 

• This table has been reformatted with separate columns for standard deviation.
• The values for the individual items range from a possible value of 1 (lo) to 5 (hi) and the item means fall on the low end of that scale. For students without disabilities (swod), the mean ranges from 1.53 to 1.97, well less than the midpoint of 2.5 but higher than the minimum of 1, and for students with disabilities (swd) the range runs higher spanning from 1.53 to 1.97.  Further, scores are higher for swd than swod for every item. In short, the mean values are low, but represent actual scale means rather than percentages.

 

7. In Table 2, the value of p is wrongly written at its bottom. P should be less than 0.1 instead of 1.0

Thank you for catching that!  We have corrected that notation. 

 

8. The statistics given for fear of crime and disability status in page6 and page7 has to be mentioned and elaborated with the help of tables.

 

We have added or amended prior tables to highlight the results of the statistical analyses included in the present submission.

 

9. The study was conducted by using data from selected staffs of Midwestern Public University. But the fear of crime might depend on other factors such as environmental conditions like visibility and socio-economic background of the staff. Also the fear of crime might depend on the frequency and exposure time of crime victimization as well as post crime victimization treatment of both on and off campus. Therefore these related studies such as Universities having similar environmental settings, similar socio-economic background of staffs, similar frequency and experiences of crime victimization need to be included.

A sentence clarifying the role of the key informants was added.  Unfortunately, the data from which this study was taken does not include measures that would speak to the factors you identify.  However, consideration of these factors is included in our suggestions for future research section.

Reviewer comment-2

 

1. I felt the introduction is somewhat rough. I am not sure it makes a convincing case for why the study needs to be done. I am not convinced by their exploration of the specific links between disability, victimization, and fear of crime. There exists a large body of studies that consistently demonstrated the adverse effects of disability status on victimization and fear of crime. It is not clear what this research adds to this body of knowledge. This issue is also apparent in the literature review section.

We have refocused the framework of our paper to consideration of policy and procedural implications that higher education administrators might consider given higher fear levels for students with disability during the daytime.   We feel the case for this research is clearer and more compelling.

2. In the second paragraph of the introduction section, the authors mentioned that “Fear of crime and criminal victimization are related but not interchangeable.” Then they listed several studies as backup evidence to support this argument. I’m not following the point of this discussion and how it relates to their study on fear of crime and victimization among students with a disability.

 

Since we have removed consideration of the analysis of the role of victimization in the fear of crime, we have also removed most of the discussion of victimization in the review of the literature.  The passages you identify are included in the content that was removed. 

 

3. There is notable missing literature. The literature review heavily focuses on the victimization experiences of persons with a disability. Although the relationship between disability and fear of crime aligns with their main research question, I noted the absence of citations from relevant literature (e.g., Daigle et al., 2022; Pyo & Haeysm 2023). Daigle, L. E., Hancock, K., Chafin, T. C., & Azimi, A. (2022). US and Canadian college students’ fear of crime: A comparative investigation of fear of crime and its correlates. Journal of interpersonal violence, 37(15-16), NP12901-NP12932. Pyo, J., & Hayes, B. E. (2023). Assessment of functional and dysfunctional perceived threat of hate crimes among persons with and without disability. Journal of interpersonal violence, 38(23- 24), 12135-12160.

We very much appreciate the note and have updated the literature review to incorporate this and other literature that informs the relationship between disability and fear of crime.

 

4. Relatedly, I would have liked to see greater effort made to explore the links between disability, fear of crime, and victimization among college students. Surprisingly, the authors did not formulate any hypotheses, despite abundant evidence suggesting meaningful relationships between these variables. The authors should provide both theoretical and empirical rationales their investigations. Without robust foundations, I don’t have a strong sense of where their research questions were coming from. In the literature review section, I would trimming content on non-main variables and instead focus more on discussing the underlying mechanism that contributes to increased fear of crime and victimization experiences among individuals with disabilities.

This comment was particularly helpful in helping us refocus our paper.  While the role of victimization is an important question, it was secondary to our larger concern with the practical implications of the fact that crime fears are significantly higher during the daytime for this vulnerable population. 

For this paper, we are less interested in exploring predictors of fear of crime than understanding what greater fear of crime means for those experiencing it and for those who have some responsibility in managing or mitigating it college campuses.  For that reason, we have attempted to draw the focus away from quantitative analyses except to the extent necessary to document the finding the policy analysis is drawn upon.  Admittedly, this is a difficult task, and we hope we have found the appropriate balance. 

In short, we wanted to avoid formal hypothesis testing and to minimize the role of quantitative analysis in this paper in favor of policy discussion.  But, because of the newness of this finding, we feel it necessary to include data to show that the relationship identified in Daigle and colleagues (2024) work was not a fluke, and further, that the finding warranted deeper reflection and consideration in terms of its practical and policy implications.  

 

5. The construction of the fear of crime measure is overall thoughtful and interesting, addressing important aspects in assessing fear of crime. However, a more thorough development and validation process needs to be undertaken before the scale can be utilized. Given that items assess distinctively different aspects of fear of crime, it is likely that the factor structure of the scale is not unidimensional. Using the entire items, the authors may want to conduct (at least) an exploratory factor analysis to explore the factor structure of items.

Similar to the response for item 4, we felt factor analysis would work against simplification of the quantitative aspects of our paper.  We did, in fact, conduct a factor analysis but the results did not advance what we were trying to do with this research.  We found a 3-factor solution.  All items loaded moderately or strongly on Factor 1 but Factors 2 and 3 included only a few items with mostly weak factor loadings (most at .4 or lower, two just over .5).  Further, there were no discernable patterns between the items singly or in combination that could be identified for either factor 2 or 3.  The scale does have a very strong reliability coefficient, however.

Nonetheless, the larger issue is that we are less concerned with parsimony of measures for our research than determining whether specific variables (e.g., location, time of day) do or do not shape crime fears.  

 

6. I appreciate the authors acknowledging the limitations of their disability measure. It would be helpful to provide, perhaps in supplementary tables, frequency distributions of victimization, disability type, and degree of functional limitation, in which the percentages are calculated among participants with each type of disability and the degree of functional limitation (e.g., % of respondents with a physical disability who report victimization experiences).

 

We did not explore this path in this paper for two reasons.  One involves the aforementioned effort to simplify and focus the quantitative analysis in favor of a discussion of policy.  The second is the very small number of students with disabilities in our sample (53) who provided enough responses to relevant questions to allow for robust analysis (N=42-47) was quite low.  We did run regression equations incorporating these variables (disability type, registration with disability services, assessment of the degree of functional limitation) but none were significant (no doubt due to empty/small cell sizes). 

7. Within the results section, only bivariate analysis tables are presented. Without full models, it is not possible to contextualize the findings or to evaluate the validity of the associated interpretations. How are the excluded variables impacting the broader relationships between constructs of interest? In other words, I suggest the authors present full multivariate regression models that predict victimization and fear of crime for each type of crime using disability and other individual characteristics such as gender, as listed in the intro and literature review sections as important factors contributing to experiences of crime.

We have included a table of the regression results (Table 3) included in our trimmed down analysis.