Preliminary communication
PERSONAL FEARS AND PERCEPTION OF DANGEROUS INCIDENTS - REACTIONS TO HAZARD SITUATIONS AND STATES
Tomislav Smerić
; Faculty of Philosophy, Zagreb
Abstract
The article discloses the results of sociological research on the reactions to the hazard incident situations and states gathered for the project „Social and Environmental Aspects of Development“ for which the investigation was made on the sample of 547 students of Zagreb and Rijeka Universities. Emotional reactions have been studied through self-evaluation of the degree of the examined people's fear in a number of offered situations and states; the obtained results point to the relatively greater frequency of fears of social and technological hazard incidents than of the natural disasters. The latent structure of the obtained evaluations can be said to be three dimensional: fear of natural disasters, fear of diseases and fear of the future. There is an attempt to establish the cognitive reactions, i. e. the perception of dangerous states, on the basis of the estimation of the degree of danger particular hazard situations and states invoke. The results are pointing to the relative permanence of the evaluation of the offered situations with regards to some earlier research results. Trying to reconstruct the latent dimensions of the perception of dangerous situations resulted in the extraction of four dimensions: danger from technology applied in construction of plants, danger of nuclear plants, danger of conventional pollution sources, danger in traffic.
Keywords
cognitive reactions to dangerous situations; emotional reactions to dangerous states; hazard
Hrčak ID:
138905
URI
Publication date:
15.1.1993.
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