Heather Lewis

Heather Lewis

 600 words

SOC-111

March 18, 2017

Quiz Crime #2

            One of the studies I read called "Ethnicity, information sources, and fear of crime" by Jodi Lane and James W. Meeker used methods and findings in the reading to determine if people are more afraid of crime due to television or newspaper. These methods and findings in the reading is that the dependent variable is fear of crime. The study examines people who live in Orange County, California (where the study took place) in which the people (focused on whites and Latinos) were asked what they were each afraid of which was a total of eight questions. The independent variables were demographics and the top source of information about crime. The demographics that were used were sex, age, education, people who were victims and the places of political lines in where the person lives. The people were also asked a specific open ended question to each get a sense of their feelings. The variables concentrated on two things that were what they feared the most and the other was what they saw as an uncertainty. At the end of the research the researchers, who did the study, wanted to know if unintended victim in which happened differently depending on the audience in which they said that in some cases the effect of terror is unintended through what the person saw as an uncertainty. They also found that when people read the newspaper there was less uncertainty in which indicated that there was less terror of crime. When people would watch the news on television there was more terror of what they saw in uncertainty of crime. There was also an impact on media sources depended on the ethic group. In this regard Latinos and whites use media differently which indicates that Latinos watch television in turn makes their terror of crime higher than the whites that read the newspaper has low terror of crime.  

            In the study called "Historical Events and Spaces of Hate: Hate Crimes against Arabs and Muslims in Post-9/11 America" by Ilir Disha, James C. Cavendish and Ryan D. King is about how hate crimes against Muslims and Arabs went up or down with an explanation as to why. In the findings and methods the researchers used determined that there was increase in hate crimes against Muslims and Arabs after the 9/11 attack by a 1600% increase. The researchers used intergroup conflict that is being driven by three types of factors: demographics, economic conditions and distribution of political power. The researchers used indent-level hate crime data in which there are several incidents that were recorded by the FBI which has several biases that a hate crime occurred. They used county-level data in which the researchers used counties that Arab has a nonzero population and they only included counties with nonzero Muslim population based on county-level estimates. The dependent variable is the combined number of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate crimes. They also used focus predictor variables in which they measured the percentage of population that is non-Hispanic white, the population that is Arab ancestry and income as an indicator of economic conditions. They focused mainly on the percentage of Arab ancestry in a county that is the focus independent variable and included some Muslim population. The control variables were the total population size and urban counties because they have crimes of all types. The researchers included political message measures that affect the result of reporting hate crimes. There were also some incident-level findings that other hate crimes against other ethnic groups went down such as Asians and Latinos. One of the only other hate crimes that increased was Jews. There was also county-level findings is that there was more hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims with higher white populations. There was a concluding thought that the hate crimes had little to do with prejudice and intergroup violence.