Assessing risk of victimization through epidemiological concepts: An alternative analytic strategy applied to routine activities theory

This paper draws upon concepts and techniques from epidemiology to examine the ability of routine activities theory to account for the risk of criminal victimization. Moving beyond the identification of risk factors for victimization, we ask how changes to causal factors might affect the risk of victimization in the general population. We find that predictors identified with more traditional methods account for the bulk of the risk, but that some are less important for understanding overall population risk because of the small numbers of people associated with them, while others are more helpful because they apply to larger numbers.