Rader, Cossman & Porter (2012) Fear of crime and vulnerability - Essay Example

Such physical vulnerabilities include gender, health, and age, while social vulnerabilities are the social economic status of such people and their race. The research held that both the physical and social vulnerabilities characteristics are interdependent causes of fear among people. The direct effects of such social vulnerabilities are tied to physical indicators of vulnerability, though occurrence of indirect effects of physical vulnerabilities are tied to fear of victimization through some indicators of social vulnerabilities.

Nahavanna (2006) explains ethical considerations as an important aspect in any quantitative research design, which includes respecting the rights of the participants, and the individual consent by the respondents. The benefits of participation as addressed by the authors would be to learn how people from different races, gender, and age distribution would react to fear of crime, leading to an informed basis on which nursing psychology has to be applied while dealing with such vulnerable groups.

Since the authors used data sets prepared from a previous research, risk benefits, and informed consent were not of much significance in this research. The board approval was obtained. In this case, the Panel Study on American Religion and Ethnicity (PS-ARE), who carried out the primary survey, authorized the use of the survey results to analyze data collected on statistics that would best describe the trend of both physical and social vulnerabilities in fear of crimes. Therefore, the researchers did not require any consent from the respondents, but required authority of the primary body that handled the research.

Since the primary survey was carried out by a religious body alongside additional data from US Census Bureau, it would be expected that respondents participated in the research willingly. In this research, the dependent variable was well identified as the proxy for fear of crime, which is reflective of the level of safety the individuals felt in their respective neighborhoods. On the other hand, the independent variables were indicated as the social and physical vulnerabilities of such groups in their neighborhood.

Data collection in this research was from analysis of the survey indicated above. The responses were classified into five distinct categories, depending on answers from respondents to the question whether they felt unsafe in their neighborhoods. “Never” was associated with 1, while “at least once a day” was rated 5. On the other hand, in physical vulnerabilities, gender (female = 1), while fair or poor health was designated by 1. Other classifying categories included level of education, and income, which were recorded in 19 categories ranging from $200,000, and marital status as married or cohabiting indicated by 1, else =0.

The rationale behind this classification was to define the respondents into refined groups as precisely as possible. Therefore, the respondents’ characteristics were the social and physical vulnerability. The time taken for the actual survey was not recorded, nor was the time taken to analyze the survey and classify the data in this research. From the primary survey, data collection involved classifying areas into a three digit zip code, and then for each three digit area, another set of two five digit zip codes were randomly formed, leading to about 90 addresses, which were selected randomly and households screened for eligibility.

Therefore, in this research, the data collected from the above defined primary research was analyzed for the physical and social vulnerability factors, and the data analyzed quantitatively. Data management