Attributing activity space as risky and safe: The social dimension to the meaning of place for urban adolescents

Abstract

The social dimension of urban adolescents' interpretation of their activity space was investigated by examining reasons for attributing place as risky and safe, and analyzing these reasons by social network quality. Activity space and social network data were collected on 301 teens presenting for routine medical check-ups. SPSS Text Analysis for Surveys performed linguistic analyses on open-ended survey responses, applying concept derivation, concept inclusion, semantic networks, and co-occurrence rules. Results produced 13 categories of reasons for locations attributed as risky and safe. Categories were then transformed into dichotomous variables and analyzed with chi-square tests by social network quality. Results indicated two categories of reasons for locations attributed as risky: alcohol and drugs and Illegal activity, which were dependent upon social network quality. Two categories of reasons for locations attributed as safe, namely protective place and Neighborhood, were also dependent upon social network quality. These findings assert that adolescents' social networks influence their interpretations of risk and safety, highlighting a social dimension to the meaning of place.

Neighborhood Built Environments Affecting Social Capital and Social Sustainability in Seoul, Korea

“…Perceived environment variables are measured by the survey respondents' perceptions. Neighborhood perceived environment quality showed a relationship with social capital [71][72][73], and it can be relevant to social sustainability [47,65]. Other studies also used perceived environment variables, such as the existence of green space, safety and maintenance [44,74].…”

“…Furthermore, because the physical ability and psychological accessibility of individuals vary, environment factors can be perceived divergently by different people. Thus, it can be compelling to analyze accessibility to public facilities or public open spaces as the perceived environment [41,68,71,75]. A total of six variables comprise two latent variables and appear to be reliable (Table 4).…”

“…It has been emphasized that this is related to social capital or social sustainability [44,45,47,51,53,65]. The second variable is the characteristics of residential areas, where an area with a high proportion of single-family houses and row/multi-family houses, narrow roads and many intersections (small blocks) can be interpreted as similar to a neighborhood type [41,50,71,73]. …”

What It's Like to Grow Older: The Aging Perceptions of People With an Intellectual Disability in Ireland

“…Categories represented higher-level concepts that captured the chief ideas and attitudes on aging expressed hy the participants who share closely related concepts, opinions, or attitudes. Categories were then independently and manually reviewed hy two independent reviewers who checked for coding errors and reaffirmed the categorizations (IBM, 2010aMason, 2010). Common errors included spelling niistakes and unusual terminologies that were uncategorized.…”

“…Unique to the TA software is the ability to map Web visualizations to examine shared themes and portray the multicategorical nature of responses (Mason, 2010) in this study, allowing deeper examination of people's opinions and strengthening the overall representation of the voices of people with ID. As an exemplar, figure 1 is the Web visualisation graph of people's perception of what growing old means to them.…”