Hot och handlingsstrategier : En komparativ studie av tre bostadsområden i Örebro

Sammanfattning: Two basic questions are dealt with in this dissertation, namely, how and why residents in three types of housing areas experience threats differently, and how and why they react differently in threatening situations.Several kinds of material are considered in this study. The primary data consists of informal tape-recorded interviews with residents from three housing estates in Örebro: 31 interviews with individuals, group interviews with 34 people, and 15 interviews with officials, i.e. policemen and social workers working in those areas. Statistics, newspaper articles from Nerikes Allehanda, sentences passed by the district court and records of social backgrounds are also included in the empirical material.In order to explain why threats differ in different housing areas, concepts like borders, moral order, levels of tolerance and social control are of great importance. Borders serve the purpose of dividing an area on the inside as well as outside. The moral order consists of a system of norms that prescribe how one should behave as an inhabitant. In other words, the more imperative the norms, the lower the levels of tolerance, i.e. inhabitants react to minor disturbances in the area. The relation between the level of tolerance and informal social control is that the higher the level of tolerance, the weaker the level of informal social control.On the one hand coping strategies in threatening situations are analyzed with the interactive approach of Crozier and Friedberg, and on the other hand by means of the phenomenon ontological security. In an interaction between a presumptive victim and a presumptive perpetrator it is important to analyze the resources available to the participants. It is not possible to predict which of them will win and which one will lose. That is determined in the negotiation process. Important factors include the resources of the actors, how actors define the situation and the reflexive pro-cess between “I” and “me”, i.e. the self. I thereby challenge both the image of the victim as passive and the way gender is stereotypically constructed. In threatening situations the ontologically secure individual and the insecure individual would appear to make use of similar types of strategies, albeit in different ways.