Types of Anxiety about Social Hazards: Focusing on Unusual and Everyday hazards

This study aims to classify anxiety attitudes toward social hazards using latent class analysis. By applying two dimensions of Solvic's (1987) psychometric study, dread and knowledge, social hazards were divided into unusual hazards (war, natural disasters, new diseases) and everyday hazards (fire, traffic accidents, food hygiene). Here, individuals can be classified into types of anxiety or no anxiety about all risks among the two types of social hazards, or types of anxiety about only one type of social hazard (anxiety, non-anxiety, unusual risk anxiety, everyday risk anxiety). Furthermore, a hypothesis was set up on how individual characteristics affect the process of being classified into four types of social anxiety. For verification, the ‘2022 Social Survey’ data from Statistics Korea was used, and 28,096 adults aged 20 years or older were analyzed. According to the results of the analysis, the higher the level of life satisfaction, health status, and preparedness, the lower the possibility of being classified as a different type of anxious group than the non-anxious group. This study is significant in that it expanded Slovic's (1987) theory on risk perception and applied it to a Korean risk situation and analyzed it empirically.