Crime Prev Community Saf (2018) 20:189–207 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41300-018-0047-6 ORIGINAL ARTICLE The impact of crime rate, experience of crime, and fear of crime on residents’ participation in association: studying 25 districts in the City of Seoul, South Korea Juheon Lee 1  · Sarah Cho 2 Published online: 21 June 2018 © Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract While the majority of studies on community crime have focused on socio-economic characteristics that lead to high or low rates of crime, the impact of crime on community residents’ social ties has received less attention. This study examines the impact of district-level crime rate, experience of crime, and fear of crime on individual community residents’ participation in association—which has been widely seen as an indicator of social capital—in the city of Seoul, South Korea. Moreover, as recent social capital studies look deeper into the diferent types of neighborhood crime connected to diferent types of associations, this study sep- arately examines the impact of total crime, violent crime, and property crime on the respondents’ social, civic engagement, reward-based, and online associations. We fnd that district-level crime rates negatively correlated with all types of asso- ciations, but the diference between violent crime and property crime was minimal. Additionally, individual-level experience of crime signifcantly decreased residents’ participation in social and online associations. However, fear of crime did not show a signifcant efect on any type of association. Keywords Crime rates · Fear of crime · Voluntary association · Social capital · Civic participation * Juheon Lee lee.juhe@husky.neu.edu Sarah Cho sarahcho@umass.edu 1 Department of Political Science, Northeastern University, 915 Renaissance Park, 360 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA, USA 2 Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 650 N. Pleasant St., Amherst, MA, USA