Toward a Psychological Typology for Victims of Interpersonal Violent Crimes: An Empirical Analysis of Behavioural Characteristics and Personality Traits.

Abstract

This doctoral project has three specific research aims that necessitated a step-wise process. The first goal is to advance a psychological typology for victims of interpersonal violent crime that focuses on behavioural characteristics and personality traits, based on data drawn from a sample of self-identified victims. The second aim is to apply the types within this newly developed psychological typology for victims to a set of interpersonal violent offences, namely domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, physical assault, and polyvictimisation. The third task is to compare the behavioural characteristics and personality traits of the refined psychological typology with the four existing typologies that served as the analytic basis of this research. The findings suggest, that a number of behavioural characteristics and personality traits are associated with risk of victimisation especially self-esteem, anger, assertiveness, risk-taking, and self-preservation. The analysis also highlights five associations between the types of the psychological typology and some crime categories, namely self-preservation with domestic violence, anger with sexual and physical assault, and anger, risk-taking, and self-preservation for victims of more than one interpersonal violent offence.

Date of Award	17 Feb 2017
Original language	English
Supervisor	Robyn A Lincoln (Supervisor)