ASSESSMENT OF BASIC ELEMENTS OF THE SECURITY SYSTEM OF LOCAL COMMUNITIES.

The aim of the present paper is to present preliminary results of the pilot research pertaining to the assessment of the fundamental elements of the local security system, the research being conducted by the authors on the statistically significant sample (4 400 persons) of the inhabitants of local communities of the Kuyavian-Pomeranian voivodeship (an administrative unit in Poland). Since the research was very extensive indeed, the present paper contains only a fragment of its results. It transpired that the sense of security of the members of the local communities of the Kuyvian-Pomeranian voivodeship is at a relatively high level. With the assumed scale (ranging from 1 to 10), the greatest number of respondents assessed it at the level of 8 points, and the absolute majority of them assessed it at least at the level of 6. Among all the elements assessed, it was the operations of fire fighters that were evaluated as best. What was assessed as definitely the worst was the functioning of health care and of non-governmental organizations. What came as a sort of surprise are relatively poor (given the allegiance to tradition exhibited by Polish society) scores given to the influence of the Church on the sense of local communality, with a relatively frequent scores falling in 1-4 range. The research method thus put forward by the authors is innovative since it offers a combination of so-called hard elements of security elements with barely measurable sense of security, as assessed by particular persons. A relatively large research sample ensures that the results are significantly informative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]