Browsing by Subject "http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p9599"

This master's thesis examines how perceived neighbourhood safety is associated with socioeconomic status in Finland from 2002 to 2018. The research questions of the thesis are, firstly, how well do measures of socioeconomic status explain perceived neighbourhood safety within people living in Finland, and secondly, has the importance of socioeconomic status in explaining experiences of insecurity changed over time. As perceived insecurity in the neighbourhood is observed to be a markedly gendered phenomenon, it is thirdly examined whether the association of socioeconomic status with perceived neighbourhood safety is different according to gender. The examination is based on the European Social Survey (ESS) data of Finland, which are somewhat representative samples of the population living in Finland. Perceived neighbourhood safety is part of the ESS core questionnaire, which has been carried out in EU countries every second year since 2002. The data used in this thesis has been collected in nine waves, in such a way that data from every even year in the timeframe 2002-2018 is used. For this purpose, the data have been merged and the final analyses include a total of 17 955 respondents. The development of perceived neighbourhood safety or insecurity over time is examined through three periods of years, which are 2002-2006, 2008-2012, and 2014-2018. The method used in the work is logistic regression, for the needs of which the response variable that measures insecurity has been coded as binary. Perceived neighbourhood safety over time in the light of the ESS surveys has not previously been investigated in Finland with a similar method and perspective. Looking at the relationship between socioeconomic status and perceived neighbourhood safety, it is observed that a lower level of education explains the experiences of insecurity in both women and men, but the connection disappears in men when background variables and other measures of socioeconomic status are held constant. On the other hand, for women, the level of education remains a statistically significant factor for experiencing insecurity in all models. When examining changes over time, it is found that the experiences of insecurity in the neighbourhood area have decreased for women, so that, above all, insecurity has decreased for those who have completed higher education. Within men, perceived insecurity in the neighbourhood is experienced less, and no statistically significant changes are detected over time according to the level of education. Instead, within male respondents, a process of differentiation according to perceived adequacy of income is observed during the time period, in such a way that those men who felt that they could get by with their current income experienced a decrease in perceived insecurity, while this did not happen to the other male respondents. At the level of all respondents, perceived insecurity in the residential area has decreased during the time period observed, but indications are found that the positive development has been slower or even stagnant in population groups of lower socioeconomic status. Experiences of insecurity have negative health effects on the ones having the experience. The connection of socioeconomic status to perceived insecurity points to an additional dimension of inequality among those living in Finland. On a general level, it was observed that lower socioeconomic status, measured according to several different indicators, predicted higher perceived neighbourhood insecurity.