Fear of Crime and its variation: towards an analysis of individual differences

Using dispositionalism, this article proposes a theoretical model to explain individual variations in perceived victimization risk. The first part focuses on previous work. This section highlights the contributions and the difficulties of the main approaches explaining fear of crime. The second part considers the concept of "dispositional fear". The idea is to propose a reading of this social phenomenon with regard to the dispositionalism of Lahire. We stress the lived past of the respondents, as shaped by the earlier threats they experienced, by their social and cultural representations of danger and by their individual characteristics, to account for their reactions to present situations.