REGIONAL PECULIARITIES OF THE STUDENT YOUTH’S SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF SAFETY AND DANGER

Abstract

The article is dealt with the specifics of modern youth’s social representations of safety. Such perceptions are an important component of mass consciousness. The data of empirical research of everyday ideas of safety and danger on micro-, meso- and macrolevels of social space are given. Students (n=232) from the three regions of Ukraine – Chernihiv, Luhansk region and Kyiv – have been interviewed. The psychosemantic features of young people's social representations about the safety and danger in the family (microsocial level), in the university and a city of residence (mesosocial level), as well as in the country and the world in general (macrosocial level) are revealed with the help of the associative test. It is clarified that the significant impact on the content of such social perceptions, among other things, is carried out by the difficult social and economic situation in Ukraine and the military and political conflict in Donbas. It is shown that the influence of the territorial factor can affect both the quantitative parameters of social representations (frequency), and their content (semantics). In particular, there are no semantic differences in the perceptions of safety/dangers in the family, such representations differ only in frequency indices. At the level of the university, a city of residence and its own country, regional representations are most distinct, the differences here are both quantitative and qualitative (semantic). Social perceptions of safety/dangers in the world in general are relatively similar (probably due to the abstract nature of this phenomenon for most young people). The perceptions of danger in different social spaces often “reflect” (are antonyms) the relevant social perceptions of safety.