Abstract

VUANELLO, Roxana. A new instrument for psychological evaluation: Unsafe City Life Questionnaire. Interdisciplinaria [online]. 2006, vol.23, n.1, pp.17-45. ISSN 1668-7027.

The profound structural changes in society over recent years are reflected in the deepening of social, economic and political inequalities, which have characterized our reality and that of several Latin American countries. In this social setting, violence appears as a disturbing phenomenon due to its varied expressions and environments of development. This growing social vulnerability fosters delinquency resulting in a safety crisis as its major effect. The widely accepted relevance of current insecurity in the field of social and legal phenomena requires a response from government as well as social organizations. Its effects on the restriction of social well being and its massive implications deserve to be included in research agendas with the objective of integrating research and intervention strategies. Unsafe city life is a problem with great incidence in human beings, politics and economics, and it questions the capacity of government and control entities to preserve human rights. Therefore, the incidence of this phenomenon is twofold: it affects the quality of life at an individual level and the processes of community development at a collective level due to their political and economic impact. In this paper, the final version of the Unsafe City Life Questionnaire (Cuestionario de Inseguridad Urbana - CIU) is described. It attempts to be a specific psychological instrument which measures insecurity, considering insecurity as the current phenomenon that affects the health of urban inhabitants in the city of San Luis (Argentina). This paper deals with theoretical foundations and psychometric characteristics of the inventory, and it provides the scales resulting from the administration of the CIU to a large sample of young people divided into two groups: crime victims and non-crime victims. From the statistics viewpoint, the reliability of the questionnaire, i.e. its internal consistency, has been studied and demonstrated using the alpha coefficient. To examine its stability and structure validity, we factor analyzed the answers. Also, the degree of discrimination between the groups was studied by the analysis of mean differences taking into account, in this research, the influence of gender. The CIU is a tool meant to discover and/or prevent the consequences of stress caused by violence. Thus, it will be possible to make psychological interventions on the impact produced by the direct experience or by the threat of crime. The results have been highly satisfactory showing that CIU is a reliable, valid and precise instrument for clinical practice and psychosocial research. We hope the CIU is taken into account when specific policies for protecting the young are laid down.

Keywords : Stress; Feeling of insecurity; Psychological assessment; Young people.

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