Youth’s Perception of Vandalistic Damages. Perception Stage

Abstract

Introduction. The necessity to counteract vandalism is due to economic, cultural and social losses. Inefficiency of the actual preventive programs calls for a new research of vandalistic behavior motives and ways to control them. The paper deals with subjective effects of vandalism – youths’ perception of vandalistic damage to urban area. Youths’ attitude to vandalistic behavior is supposed to get shaped already at the perception stage, that is why research of this stage is viewed as essential to reveal initial and regulatory drivers of vandalism. Objectives. The study is aimed at researching special aspects of youths’ perception of vandalism through identification of cognitive, emotional, valueand-sense, attitude and visual motor components of a perceptual act. The goal of the study implies the following research challenges: 1. to identify subjectively essential forms of vandalism; 2. to reveal conventional forms of vandalism; 3. to discover the effect of role-oriented position on vandalism perception; 4. to identify the effect of vandalistic experience on visual motor characteristics of vandalistic stimuli perception. Methods. Phenomenological approach to social-environmental research of urban area is the major tool of the study. This method enables to explain some research findings by subjective attitude of urban youths to vandalistic damages. In the course of the experiment this attitude manifested itself in the evaluation and orientation as reaction to images of urban vandalistic damages. The main research procedure is experiment. In the course of the experiment a subject was given stimuli, his visual motor reactions and changes of their ophthalmic system were fixed. Data were collected through self-evaluation reports fixing psychoemotional state, attitude and understanding of vandalistic damages, as well as through an eye tracker Tobii Pro Spectrum measuring oculomotor responses to the stimuli. The processing method was descriptive statistics, U-criteria of Mann-Whitney. Participants and stimuli. The stimuli were 10 images of vandalistic damages to urban area. The survey sample included 103 people aged 19-24 with proportional correlation of men and women. They were divided into 8 focus groups. The experiment lasted 1 hour and 40 minutes for each group. The eye tracker research was conducted with a group of 11 people (72,2 % – girls). Results: 1) Subjectively significant forms of vandalism are graffiti, littering and property destruction. 2) Conventional forms of vandalism are damage to recreational areas, the building and its premises. 3) Roles I-vandal and I-viewer (observer) differ in evaluation of admissibility of vandalistic actions and their significance. 4) Previous vandalistic experience affects visual motor characteristics of vandalistic damages perception. Scientific novelty. The research findings give a wider scope of vandalistic actions perception, proving that a role-oriented position influences on evaluation of vandalistic damages and vandalistic experience, predetermines orientation and evaluation of vandalistic damages. Practical significance. Developed research procedure of vandalistic damages to urban area perception enables to collect data about oculomotor response and can be applied for similar research.