Abstract

This first chapter is focused on the whole research project under the title “The phenomenological study of security and insecurity: the overview of the conduct of the research”. Our project had some very ambitious objectives and tasks. The aim was “to create the overview of the general insecurity and its reasons in Finland and Estonia” and “to specify the concept of the insecurity, its basic dimensions and levels” and “to form a typology of insecurity”. This publication begins with an analysis of the concepts of insecurity and security and their different definitions. One of the most essential starting points in our preliminary assumptions for this research was that security and insecurity are strong, contextual phenomena. The entire frame of reference of the insecurity research was under investigation, too. After these many decades of work, this report will still proceed by describing the carrying out of our insecurity research in practice. We will examine in this publication the prevalence of insecurity and the reasons and methods of controlling it. There will be plenty of descriptions of basic dimensions and many more deeply analysed results, i.a. the results concerning the fundamental dimensions and the levels of insecurity. The most interesting results in this research are the insecurity types, which we have identified by cluster analysis.