Social Representations of Citizen Security: ECU 911 Case in Ecuador

Abstract

Social phenomena such as citizen security are represented intersubjectively through discourses, practices, ideas, feelings and opinions, which respond to the belief systems of a given time and space, for these reasons these material and symbolic phenomena in general, must be understood in the individual and collective bifurcation of the objective and subjective. In this context, through the phenomenological-hermeneutic methodology that describes realities and simultaneously interprets their possible meanings, the objective of this research was to decipher the social representations of citizen security, through the case study of ECU 911, as a service of immediate and integral response to emergencies in the Ecuadorian territory. It is concluded that social representations of citizen security do not necessarily fit with statistical data, so that, in a population like the province of Chimborazo in Ecuador, what is really important is the subjective way in which people perceive security and how they feel and act in their coexistence spaces, beyond the imprint of certain objective phenomena such as delinquency and criminality, which are a constant in Latin American history.