Cultivating Anxieties: Media Consumption and Fear of Violent Crime in America

The current study examines the relationship between social media consumption and fear of violent crime. The goal of our study is to make three contributions to the literature. One is to provide further evidence about social media consumption and the fear of violent crime, as previous research has yet to find a link between the two. A second is to provide evidence on various types of media consumption and their association with fear of violent crime, specifically. While research has evaluated the relationship between multiple types of media consumption and fear of crime in general, little research on fear of violent crime as an outcome variable has been conducted. The third contribution of our study is to provide evidence on the impact of mass communication on fear of violent crime, using samples from several regions. Most existing studies that measured fear of crime as a dependent variable have relied upon young adult samples from one or two schools. All these studies have suggested that future research should use larger, more diverse samples to replicate previous findings. Addressing these gaps in the extant research, the current study empirically builds on research on media consumption and fear of crime by examining a national sample of 1,014 U.S. adults from the American Fears survey.