Abstract

The primary purposes of the current research are: (1) to examine how individual disposition and social context in criminal offending and victimization, and (2) examine this relationship in understudied crime locations – in this study, urban nightlife venues (i.e., bars and nightclubs). These social contexts provide a major source of leisure activity for numerous young adults today but remain an understudied hot-spot in mainstream criminology, despite the fact that levels of crime and victimization associated with these scenes is regarded as widespread and increasing. Examining crime and victimization in this increasingly popular socio-cultural context has the potential to expand the scope of criminology by accounting for settings and populations not sufficiently addressed in prior work. Theoretically I draw on the recently proposed storyline approach outlined by Robert Agnew.

Using storylines as an analytical framework, I posit that as an individual enters certain social contexts, situations will arise that lead to opportunities for crime, deviance, and victimization. Whether outcomes such as physical and sexual assault occur depend on the three factors: (1) a certain individual disposition – which includes more static characteristics influenced by one's background, as well as more ephemeral characteristics such emotional state and role identity, (2) a social context or spatial location that is either conducive to or prohibitive of criminal outcomes, and (3) a confrontation or situation that arises where an individual makes certain behavioral choices. Depending on the confluence of these three factors, some individuals will engage in crime, some will become victims, and others will either experience non-criminal outcomes or walk away from potentially dangerous situations.

In order to provide empirical support for this thesis I use multi-method ethnographic data to construct: (1) storylines about respondent experiences with physical and sexual assault, (2) identity profiles to identify key dispositional or "background" factors, and (3) contextual profiles detailing the organization and atmosphere of the social spaces in which their criminal and victimization experiences occurred. The analysis then pairs 1-3 into what kind of combinations resulted in physical and sexual assault, and reveals the contribution of each of the three factors specified: situation, disposition, and context. This dissertation is a secondary analysis of a previous ethnographic study on which this author served as the primary research assistant/co-investigator. All analyses are based on information collected in this 2005-2006 ethnographic study.