Fear and perceived risk of personal and violent crime following the Boston Marathon bombing: a quasi-experimental study of avoidance

Terrorist events have considerable impacts on the individuals who experience them both directly and indirectly. Although scholarship on the impacts of terrorism has largely concentrated on the 9/11 attacks, growing attention has focused on the effects of the Boston Marathon bombing. The present study contributes to this work by exploring changes in avoidance behaviors as they relate to college students’ fear and perceived risk of personal and violent crime using a naturally occurring separate-sample quasi-experiment with both pre- and post-bombing data collected at a university less than two miles from the site of the attack. The findings indicate that although there were no significant differences in the employment of avoidance behaviors between the groups surveyed before and after the bombing, affective factors–namely fear of personal crime and of being murdered–were significantly correlated with their use. Cognitive factors (e.g. perceived risk) were less consistently predictive of the employment of avoidance. Moreover, the use of these behavioral responses was found to differ based on the respondents’ sex and race/ethnicity, while factors such as prior violent victimization did not have any effect. Implications for policy, considerations for future research, and limitations of this study are also discussed.