Psychosemantic Research into the Phenomenon of Risk

Abstract

The psychological aspect of risk constitutes one of the most discussed issues of modern interdisciplinary research. The profession of the psychologist implies a range of situations of risk for a specialist at various stages of career development. This article presents the results of a psychosemantics research into perceptions of the phenomenon of risk as seen by the students of the Department of Psychology. The findings clarify the peculiarities of the semantic sphere regarding the risks at the initial stage of acquiring the profession. The research was conducted in 2017. The sample comprised 60 students of the Department of Psychology. This research was based on the semantic differential technique modified by I.L. Solomin. We altered and extended the list of objects in accordance with the research goals. The results were processed by means of cluster and factor analysis. The analysis of individual clustering trees revealed rather significant semantic variability between the researched objects. A few subgroups of respondents were distinguished according to the individual peculiarities of semantic fields regarding the object ‘risk’. With the help of factor analysis, the specifics of the affective attitude toward the object ‘risk’ were determined for both the whole sample and the individual subgroups of respondents. The psychosemantics approach completes the picture of the study into the psychological aspect of risk in professional activity and enables to identify the topics, which clarify the subtle nuances of the meaning of the notion ‘risk’ in the conscience of a specialist. Thus, there are vagueness and ambiguity of the subjective view of risk by psychology students, ambivalence of the affective attitude to risk, and a range of semantic subgroups toward the notion ‘risk’.