Job activities and personal crime victimization: Implications for theory

Theoreticians have used the concepts of lifestyle and routine activities to account for the occurrence of personal crime victimization. Research has not usually used direct measures of these concepts, however, instead relying on demographic variables such as age and sex as proxy indicators. This paper analyzes the relationship of various job activities (delivering passengers or goods, traveling out of town, dealing face-to-face with customers, and working irregular hours) to the risk of violent and theft-damage personal crime victimization, and to the risk of such victimization at work. Logistic regression models show that delivery of passengers or goods and dealing with the public are robustly associated with violent victimization. None of the four job activities are consistently associated with theft-damage victimization risk. The results illustrate the importance of using direct measures of life-style or routine activities to examine exposure to the risk of victimization. The findings also suggest the need to elaborate further the notion of exposure, and to develop a second generation of victimization theory.     

Social welfare in the light of topic modelling

With an increased focus on social well-being in response to a burgeoning global economy exposing the weaknesses of social welfare policies, research output in the field has grown exponentially. Keeping track of the evolving research themes proves difficult due to the steady rise in the number of studies published in the interdisciplinary field of social welfare. Therefore, researchers need a comprehensive overview to confirm the current shape of the field based on the published research. Using a latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm as a topic modelling technique, this study identified 12 prominent themes from more than 10,000 research outputs on social welfare published from 2000 to 2020 in Scopus-indexed journals. Such an exploratory text-mining approach to literature review provides broad insights into the diversity of research and may serve as a foundation for further in-depth studies. Identifying these 12 thematic areas and their sub-themes allows us to articulate the complexity and diversity of social welfare issues, which go far beyond the field of well-established welfare economics or social work. The study shows that the topic of ‘social welfare’ has not only evolved over time but has significantly broadened its meaning. It can no longer be solely synonymous with institutional social security. We contend that research in this area needs to take into account a broader and more systematic range of determinants constituting the dynamic character of social welfare.