Citizen security, economic adaptation, and quality of life in urban households

Introduction Citizen insecurity is associated with household economic decisions, everyday practices, and social relationships. This study explores the relationships between perceived citizen security conditions, economic adaptation, social coexistence transformations, and household quality of life in urban areas of Guayas, Ecuador. Methods A quantitative, non-experimental, cross-sectional, descriptive-correlational survey was conducted in Guayaquil, Durán, Daule, and Samborondón. The analytic sample comprised 101 adults with primary or shared responsibility for household economic decisions. Descriptive statistics, internal-consistency diagnostics, Spearman correlations with bootstrap confidence intervals, and parsimonious linear regression models with HC3 robust standard errors were applied. Adjusted models controlled for age, education, and monthly household income. Results Respondents reported substantial changes in mobility, consumption, protection, saving capacity, social interaction, and interpersonal trust. Perceived insecurity showed a weak and non-significant Spearman association with economic adaptation, whereas unadjusted and adjusted linear models showed significant inverse associations, yielding mixed exploratory evidence for H1. Economic adaptation and transformations in social coexistence were significantly associated with greater perceived quality-of-life impacts, patterns consistent with H2 and H3 within this sample. Discussion The findings provide exploratory household-level evidence that perceived insecurity is associated with economic responses, transformations in social coexistence, and perceived quality-of-life impacts. However, the non-probability sample, cross-sectional design, study-specific instrument, and shared security-attribution wording across some measures require cautious interpretation and preclude causal or population-level conclusions.