Qualities and Configurations of Insecurity in the United States and Spain
基于对美国和西班牙164名年轻大学毕业生的跨国访谈，研究发现两国受访者对不安全的感知存在显著差异：西班牙人认为不安全是狭窄、明确且暂时的，而美国人则认为其广泛、模糊且反复出现。该研究揭示了不安全感知的多维性及其结构性根源。
In recent decades, socioeconomic insecurity—encompassing employment precarity and economic instability—has become increasingly widespread. However, insecurity manifests differently across contexts. How do people interpret the insecurity in their own contexts? Drawing on 164 crossnational interviews with young college graduates, most facing insecurity, in the U.S. and Spain, I find that respondents in each national context perceive insecurity as having starkly different qualities. While Spanish respondents perceive insecurity as narrow, unambiguous, and transitory, American respondents perceive it as broad, ambiguous, and recurrent. I develop a framework that illuminates, first, how these perceived qualities of insecurity are underpinned by people's understandings of the structural conditions of insecurity in each context— or “configurations of insecurity”— and second, the consequences of these perceptions. This study examines the meanings ascribed to structural conditions of insecurity, reveals the multidimensionality of perceived insecurity, and develops a framework that elucidates the sources and consequences of those perceptions.