CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS AND MEASUREMENT OF PERSONAL SAFETY REPRESENTATIONS

References: International Multidisciplinary Scientific Conference on Social Sciences and Arts SGEM2014, www.sgemsocial.org , SGEM2014 Conference Proceedings, ISBN 978-619-7105-22-3 / ISSN 2367-5659, September 1-9, 2014, Book 1, Vol. 1, 61-68 pp

ABSTRACT
The paper is devoted to the problem of studying the personal representations about safety as a component of worldview and a person’s activity regulator. The research purpose is to develop and verify a questionnaire that would be able to detect a person’s representations about safety. The study includes different methods of analyzing data: theoretical analysis, content-analysis, interview, testing, correlation analysis and factor analysis. Two hundred and four subjects, aged from 18 to 25, participated in the study. It was found that the personal representations about safety depend on perceptions of the absence of danger or fit certain conditions of security. Due to theoretical analysis two criteria for classifying the safety conditions were highlighted: 1) controllability by person; 2) person’s protected substructures. Safety conditions were organized into four groups: a) external conditions (provided externally) – generally this group doesn’t depend on a person’s efforts; b) internal – lifestyle characteristics, social environment features, psychological factors, which mainly reveal a result of person’s activity; c) the conditions of preservation of life and physical health; d) conditions providing psychological health, protection of spiritual values, the values of self-realization and the right to make an independent choice of one’s life way. The scale allows assessing a person’s representations about general conditions, which are necessary for life in the modern world, the notions about security conditions, significant for certain person’s life, and their ensuring nowadays. It was concluded that person’s representations about safety are linked to person’s values, basic beliefs and subjective quality of life.

Keywords: questionnaire, psychology of personal safety, personal representations, human security, worldview, basic beliefs, values