The risk of personal victimization among the aged

This study examines the likelihood of personal victimization among the aged as a function of a multitude of factors such as characteristics of the victim and environmental conditions. Although the effects of a number of variables (e.g., age, sex, race, and income) on victimization have been studied, they are generally restricted to descriptive or bivariate analyses. Attempts to examine the impact of all relevant factors simultaneously have been rare. This is probably due to the small proportion of crime victims included in most victimization surveys and the fact that statistical techniques dealing with discrete dependent variables are not yet widely used by researchers. In this study, a maximum likelihood logistic probability model was applied to delineate the effects of individual and environmental attributes on victimization. Data for this analysis came from the National Crime Survey conducted between 1973 and 1976 by the Census Bureau for the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. Logit analysis revealed that characteristics of both the victim and the environment have fairly consistent effects on the likelihood of personal victimization.