Homicide Victimizations Across Time and Place: The Intersection of Developmental and Subcultural Theories.

Prior research on individual risk factors has empirically described how the risks and circumstances of being a homicide victim vary greatly across age levels (including dramatic shifts across childhood into early adulthood) -- patterns that are well explained by Finkelhor's developmental model of violence. Other aggregate-level homicide research has documented how the risks of being murdered vary geographically across types of communities and cultural settings -- patterns usually explained in terms of social structural or subcultural models of violence. This paper analyzes the intersection of these two approaches by combining them within a life course perspective, in which developmental patterns are viewed as generally socially variable and conditional, rather than invariably universal. The data analysis uses UCR Supplementary Homicide Report data for the years 2000-2004; the data on individual homicide victims and events are combined with community-level data from the census bureau to index the social and ecological contexts of the homicide victimizations. The analysis details the major variations in homicides risks and event characteristics across age levels (as per the Developmental Model of Violence), and then assesses the variability of these patterns across regional and community-level contexts (as per the Subcultural and the Social Disorganization Models of Violence). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]