The Human Dimension of Security: Subjective Assessments and Personal

Abstract

The social context of modernity is characterized by systemic transformations, constant changes, the fundamental feature of which is uncertainty, the fundamental possibility of negative consequences and outcomes of processes, events, phenomena, decisions.Subjective feeling, personal assessment of risk and one's own vulnerability, and, consequently, the degree of security become a factor in designing a strategy for interacting with a risky environment. The identification and selection of adequate methods for measuring factors that are involved in the subjective assessment of risk and vulnerability, the interpretation of the meanings that respondents put into understanding the phenomenon of security, are an interesting scientific problem and a significant task for social practice.The article attempts to demonstrate the complementarity of sociological data obtained by methods of quantitative and qualitative empirical sociology, both at the stage of designing and piloting tools, and when interpreting the results. The discourse is carried out in relation to the currently relevant problem of human security.The empirical section of the article demonstrates the perspective of the approach to measuring the subjective assessment of security in mass surveys through the indicator of sufficiency of the sense of security and the factors associated with it. Thus, a statistically significant relationship of the feeling of security with gender, age, type of settlement, education, with subjectivity, that is, with responsibility for risk, was revealed Nevertheless, there was a clear insufficiency of the semantic component to ensure the reliability of the interpretation of the result obtained, a request for additional information, for which the use of methods of qualitative sociology, working just with the semantic level of consciousness, is indispensable.The result of applying the methods of qualitative sociology (interview, focus discussion) the following typology became established: when responding, respondents correlated their safety assessments mainly with the presence/absence of threats to the physiological state and material and property status of the personal and immediate environment.The positions of comparing personal security assessments with non-material factors are also revealed: with the presence of relatives and friends, with instability and uncertainty that threaten the social and life prospects of one's own and the immediate environment. In the older age group, security is understood as having a strong authority that ensures order.The complementarity of quantitative and qualitative sociological methods increases the reliability and completeness of the interpretation of mass survey data regarding the phenomena and processes under study.

Keywords

• safety
• methods of measurement
• responsibility
• assessment
• risk
• subjectivity
• vulnerability