PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This work will pursue four general objectives: firstly, the identification of the contextual configuration linked with violent crime, that is, the material conditions produced by interrelations between socio-economic conditions, social stratification, institutional frameworks and socially structured access to opportunities. Secondly, to describe the form in which these components are articulated in particular contexts to generate criminogenic contexts. Thirdly, to find a theoretically-based model capable of being applied to empirical research. Fourthly, bring together theoretical discussions to the requirements of comparative research. The first chapter reviews the present state of comparative research on violent crime and particularly on homicide. It will address three basic topics: the place of comparative studies in criminology; the cross-national research on homicide; and the problems that need to be dealt with in order to improve the comparative study of homicide. The second chapter is a critical reconsideration of the economic explanations of crime. For my purposes, I have classified these explanations as follows: the rationality-based approach; the political economy of crime; and the explanations based on economic deprivation. The third chapter is a general review of the sociological approach and of the anomie-strain tradition in particular. In this chapter the anomie-strain tradition is represented by the works of Durkheim, Merton and the Institutional-Anomie Theory. The fourth chapter brings together the main threads of the previous chapters into the concept of social strain. Its objective is to argue in favour of social strain as a methodological and theoretical plausible concept for the comparative study of homicide rates in Europe. Finally, in the fifth chapter I translate the concept of social strain into a model that seeks to explain how a particular contextual configuration at the meso-level may be probabilistically associated with higher rates of violent crime. For the empirical study, factorial analysis and structural equation modelling have been applied in order to find social strain amongst a nonrandom sample of 193 Western European regions from 2001 to 2006.