Social Solidarity and the Fear of Risk: Examining Worries about the Recurrence of a Mass Tragedy in a Small Community

Abstract

In November 2007, the Jokela community experienced the first large-scale school shooting in Finland. The paper examines how local residents perceive the risk of school shootings, as an extreme crisis, reoccurring. We are particularly interested in how social solidarity associates with the fear of this type of risk. We use a natural experimental design to see if recurrence of a potential mass tragedy changes the relationship between solidarity and the perception of different types or risks. Our data are derived from two separate mail surveys of Jokela adults in 2008 (n = 330) and 2009 (n = 278), respectively. The strength of our data is that the second large-scale school shooting in Finland, which took place in the fall of 2008, occurred between the collections of the two data sets. We find that once extreme tragedies become more common, the protective functions of social solidarity tends to diminish as a source of protective factor for social communities.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.