Citation

Archer D, Erlich-Erfer L. Soc. Psychol. Q. 1991; 54(4): 343-352.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1991, American Sociological Association, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This is an archival study of fear and fearful behavior. In 1973, a single county in California was beset by a dramatic epidemic of homicide. We examine two archival indictors of fear: handgun purchases and hitchhiking. We use these indictors to study the distribution of fear in time, place, and the social order. The results show that archival data can be used to reconstruct emotional responses to fearful events, that community fear peaks after the objective danger is past, that community fear is more uniformly spread than the objective danger, and that gun purchases after violent events are demographically similar to gun purchases at other times. We indicate some characteristics of unusually fearful individuals, describe the persistence of fear, and discuss empirical differences between objective and subjective fear.