Risky Places: Risky actions in risky situations
This seminar emphasises the role of person-environment interaction in acts of crime. Rooted in the theoretical framework of Situational Action Theory, this discussion of risky places centres on the interaction of crime actors with the risky characteristics of settings. Alongside the more commonly studied characteristics of settings, a crucial component of risky places is the presence of risky people engaging in risky activities. Most importantly for this perspective, studying this ‘situational interaction’ requires data that captures the convergence of particular kinds of people and particular kinds of settings in the spatially and temporally relative moment of an act of crime. The Space-Time Budget (STB) is research tool designed to do just that. This seminar revisits some published findings using rare STB data from the Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+) to demonstrate why this kind of approach and methodology is so important for our understanding of risky places, and to highlight what distinguishes the findings facilitated by such methods from those generated by more traditional approaches to studying concentrations of crime.