SELF‐CONTROL AND VICTIMIZATION: A META‐ANALYSIS

• Author: KEVIN A. WRIGHT,KATHLEEN A. FOX,TRAVIS C. PRATT,JILLIAN J. TURANOVIC
• Published date: 01 February 2014
• Date: 01 February 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12030

SELF-CONTROL AND VICTIMIZATION:

A META-ANALYSIS∗

TRAVIS C. PRATT, JILLIAN J. TURANOVIC,

KATHLEEN A. FOX, and KEVIN A. WRIGHT

School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Arizona State University

KEYWORDS: self-control, victimization, meta-analysis

A consequential development in victimization theory and research was the idea that

individuals with low self-control self-select into the various risky behaviors that may

ultimately result in their victimization. To establish the empirical status of the self-

control–victimization link, we subjected this body of work to a meta-analysis. Our mul-

tilevel analyses of 311 effect size estimates drawn from 66 studies (42 independent data

sets) indicate that self-control is a modest yet consistent predictor of victimization. The

results also show that the effect of self-control is significantly stronger when predict-

ing noncontact forms of victimization (e.g., online victimization) and is significantly

reduced in studies that control directly for the risky behaviors that are assumed to

mediate the self-control–victimization link. We also note that the studies assessing self-

control and victimization are not representative of victimization research as a whole,

with intimate partner violence (IPV), violence against women, and child abuse being

severely underrepresented. We conclude that future research should continue to exam-

ine the causal processes linking self-control to victimization, how self-control shapes

victims’ coping responses to their experience, and whether self-control matters in con-

texts where individuals may have limited autonomy over the behavioral routines that

put them at risk for victimization.

Criminologists have long observed a meaningful correlation between offending and vic-

timization (Gottfredson, 1981; Maxfield, 1987; Wolfgang, 1958). While some have been

more cautious concerning the magnitude and direction of this relationship, as well as its

generality (e.g., see Bouffard et al., 2008; Turanovic and Pratt, 2013; Widom, 1989a), oth-

ers have preferred to be patently unambiguous on the subject. Indeed, Gottfredson and

Hirschi (1990: 17) went so far as to contend that “victims and offenders tend to share all

or nearly all social and personal characteristics.” Such a statement is, of course, at odds

with the large body of work on intimate partner violence (IPV), violence against women,

and family violence, which shows that offenders and victims tend to differ along several

important characteristics (see, e.g., Bachman, 1994; McHugh and Frieze, 2006; Widom,

∗Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the Wiley Online

Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2011.52.issue-1/issuetoc.

The authors wish to thank Michael D. Reisig, Kristy Holtfreter, and Callie Burt for their extremely

helpful comments on a previous draft of this article. We also would like to acknowledge John

Shjarback’s contributions in helping to generate the sample and the statistical advice from Gary

Sweeten and Eric Hedberg. Finally, we wish to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments and

D. Wayne Osgood for his patience and assistance throughout the process. Direct correspondence

to Travis C. Pratt, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Arizona State University, 411 N.

Central Ave., Ste. 600, Phoenix, AZ 85004 (e-mail: tcpratt@asu.edu).

C2013 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12030

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 52 Number 1 87–116 2014 87

88 PRATTETAL.

1989b). Nevertheless, over five decades of research does reveal a strong victim–offender

overlap (Jennings, Piquero, and Reingle, 2012).

This is not to say that victimization and offending should be treated as interchangeable

dependent variables since they are certainly not the same thing. And where victimiza-

tion research was once marginalized in the hierarchy of criminologists’ attention, it is

now enjoying considerable theoretical and empirical vitality in its own right (Lauritsen,

2010; Rountree, Land, and Miethe, 1994; Xie, 2010). A key challenge facing the field is

to develop theories that can account for both offending and victimization. This task has

been undertaken to a certain extent by Agnew’s (2006) general strain theory, Anderson’s

(1999) code of the street thesis, and in Tittle’s (1995, 2004) control balance theory. Yet ar-

guably the bulk of the work in this area in recent years has emerged from the self-control

tradition. Following Schreck’s (1999) application of self-control as a source of vulnerabil-

ity for victimization, scholars have tested repeatedly whether those with low self-control

are at a greater risk to be victimized (Ousey, Wilcox, and Fisher, 2011; Piquero et al., 2005;

Vazsonyi et al., 2012). Holes in this research remain, and the studies that have assessed

self-control and victimization are certainly not representative of victimization research as

a whole (e.g., violence against women and child abuse are virtually ignored). Neverthe-

less, a growing roster of studies indicates that self-control is an independent predictor of

multiple forms of violent and property victimization (Holtfreter, Reisig, and Pratt, 2008;

Schreck, Stewart, and Fisher, 2006; Stewart, Elifson, and Sterk, 2004). And while the rela-

tionship between self-control and offending has already been well established (Pratt and

Cullen, 2000), the literature examining the link between self-control and victimization has

reached a level of maturity where it would now be useful to “take stock” of its empirical

status as well.

The purpose of the current study, therefore, is to subject this body of work on self-

control and victimization to a meta-analysis. Our analysis is based on 311 effect size es-

timates drawn from 66 empirical studies (42 independent data sets) of the relationship

between self-control and victimization that we analyze using the appropriate multilevel

modeling techniques. In doing so, three interrelated objectives serve as our guides. First,

we seek to determine the overall effect size of self-control on victimization within this

literature. Second, our analyses are aimed at uncovering how the magnitude of the self-

control–victimization relationship varies according to the methodological choices made

by the scholars who have produced this work. Some of the moderators we explore are rel-

evant to assessing the generality of the self-control–victimization relationship (e.g., across

variations in types of samples used and measures employed), while others address theo-

retically relevant points about the nature of the relationship (e.g., forms of victimization

studied and whether theoretically based intervening processes are measured). Finally,

given our assessment of what has been done in this literature thus far, we specify several

promising directions that the next generation of victimization research in this theoretical

tradition may take. In the end, our broader purpose is to try to inform the field about

the extent to which—and how—self-control should be an integral part of victimization

research in the future.

CONTEXT OF VICTIMIZATION THEORY AND RESEARCH

Although early explanations of victimization focused on factors such as victim precipi-

tation (von Hentig, 1948) and the subculture of violence (Wolfgang and Ferracuti, 1967),