Unexpected Victimization and Its Consequences for Affective Well-Being

• In Event: Mental Health, Help Seeking, and Victimization

Abstract

Research on heterogeneous victimization effects is vital because it provides knowledge about victims who will struggle most after a crime experience and will thus be in most need of help. However, few longitudinal studies have analyzed the differential consequences of criminal victimization so far. The current study addresses this limitation by examining whether the effects of violent victimization on subjective well-being differ by the victim’s sense of vulnerability and safety before the incident. To do this, it uses two-wave panel data from two German cities in 2020/2021 (n ≈ 2,900). In the analyses, people were first stratified into subgroups according to their level of perceived vulnerability. Then, Energy weighting, weighted panel regressions, and g-computation were applied to the subgroups to estimate group-specific causal effects. The preliminary findings from the analyses suggest that (1) the impact of victimization on subjective well-being was overall modest over most of the subgroups and (2) proved to be only more substantial for victims who perceived the risk of victimization to be rather small before the crime.

Author

• Florian Kaiser, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law