FEAR OF CRIME, SECURITY PERCEPTION AND PREVENTIVE BEHAVIOUR

The presented study analyses the social and personal predictors of the perception of safety, as a cognitive-emotional image of safety conditions in a defined living space of an individual. There is no consensus on the definition and measurement of security as a dependent variable. Particular tools are used to monitor the risk of victimization, fear of crime and preventive behavior. The aim of the study is to analyse the effect of vulnerability, victimization and contextual variables (ethnic threat, neighborhood issues) on the security perception, fear of crime, and preventive behavior in Slovakia. The second goal was to verify the impact of other psychological constructs – the need for structure, self-control, and conservatism – on these dependent variables. The results of the study confirmed a different structure of the predictors of security perception, fear of crime, as well as preventive behavior. Almost all the traditionally studied predictors were significant for the security perception. It has been confirmed that vulnerable groups, particularly women, the elderly, respondents from larger cities, and the victimized are more likely to have a lower level of security perception; which corresponds to a number of findings that repeatedly confirm the significant impact of the vulnerability factors on the security perception. Preventive behavior in this context appears to be a significantly different construct as compared to the security perception and fear of crime. The question of the impact of other psychological constructs on the preventive behavior remains open.