Professional Bio

Professor Wilcox’s research and teaching interests lie in the following areas: communities and crime, crime opportunity and crime-related decision-making, victimization, reactions to the threat of victimization (e.g., perceived risk, fear, precautionary and avoidance behavior), gender and crime/victimization, school crime and prevention.

Her 2022 book, School Zone, presents and synthesizes findings from work as a co-Investigator on a longitudinal study of offending and victimization among seventh–tenth grade youths that was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.  Recent analyses of the data focus on the effects of retaliatory norms on student victimization and the potentially gendered effects of school crime prevention tactics on student misbehavior.

With funding from Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts, Professor Wilcox recently collected survey data on a national sample of 1500 adults with ongoing analyses focused on reactions to the threat of crime victimization in terms of precautionary and avoidance behavior. Also, with funding from Penn State’s Criminal Justice Research Center, she is engaged in a new mixed-methods study of experiences with community corrections (probation and parole) in rural Pennsylvania counties from the perspectives of both clients and officers. One part of the project focuses on client experiences that include fear, avoidance behavior, and attitudes about community, and it will examine how these experiences vary by the client’s PO style (e.g., punitiveness v. rehabilitative focus), client gender and self-efficacy, and organizational context. Another part of the project will focus on PO occupational satisfaction and how that varies by the intersection of gender, officer style, and organizational context.