This research examined the effect of concealment (environmental cues), presence or absence of people recreating (social cues), and gender on individuals’ fear of crime in a community park setting. Using a 7-point single- item indicator, 732 participants from two samples (540 park visitors and 192 college students) rated their estimates of fear of crime to 24 photographic representations of a community park. All three, two-factor interaction effects were significant in the park visitor sample, but in the student sample, only the Presence of People Recreating × Gender effect was significant. These results suggest that social and environmental cues may jointly affect fear experiences and that the presence of other people recreating in a park environment and the gender of an individual may influence fear of crime when recreating alone in a park setting. Implications include design and management techniques that promote safe park environments.
Tourists and others who are unfamiliar with an environment may be sensitive to environmental cues when choosing their walking routes. In this study, we combined inductive and deductive approaches to evaluate walkability cues. We defined a set of walkability variables by analyzing the narratives of par- ticipants, who walked along one of 19 diverse routes. These cues were then supplemented with environmental and walkability variables from Mehrabian and Russel scales (Russel et al., 1981) and SPACES (Pikora, 2003), resulting in a total of 48 descriptors. Using the 48 descriptors, 60 diverse photos of streetscape views were rated, and we identified 14 relevant walkability corre- lates. Using principal component analysis, we identified six components that best predicted walking decisions: safety from traffic, comfort of walking area, environmental appearance, activity potential, shade and exploration. These results suggest that real walkers make more finely grained walking judgments than those measured by current, conceptualized walkability scales.
