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ACCI 2026 Conference

April 13–15, 2026

Hilton Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, USA

IMPORTANT NOTICE: The date, time, and room assignment of YOUR presentation is SUBJECT TO CHANGE.

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D1a Close Your Windows, Lock Your Doors: A Framework of How Crime Concerns Influence Crime-Protective Consumer Behavior

Wednesday, April 15, 2026 at 8:00 AM–9:30 AM PDT
Room 1
Short Description

This paper presents a qualitative study of Reddit comment data, investigating how individuals leverage consumption to protect themselves from criminal threats. Our analysis finds that people consume to serve three strategic functional categories of protective consumption behaviors: threat-detecting, vulnerability-reducing and severity-reducing strategies. Within these overarching strategies, our analysis of the field data also supports consumers’ use of four particular tactical functions: withdrawal, deterrence, resistance, and recovery. We leverage protection motivation theory as an enabling lens to analyze the data; in doing so, we offer contributions to the theory as well. We discuss these strategies/tactics by introducing what we term the Crime-Protective Consumption Framework. A deeper understanding of how consumers derive value from consumption activities to protect themselves, others, and their property from crime can help guide new product development and marketing messages, and more broadly, illuminate how criminal hazards influence consumer decision-making.

Type of presentation

Accepted Oral Presentation

Submitter

Robert Arias, PhD, Loyola University Chicago

Authors

Robert Arias, PhD, Loyola University Chicago
Dallas Novakowski, College of New Caledonia
Miranda Yin, Orfalea College of Business, California Polytechnic State University
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