Resume
Modelling the factor composition of security threats from the perspective of Czech and Slovak respondents and experts in the CR
PhDr. Jan Paďourek, Police Academy of the Czech Republic in Prague, postgraduate student
Dr. Zdeněk Kovařík, CSc., Police Academy of the Czech Republic in Prague, Department of Science and Research
The study follows two sets of empirical research that were conducted at the Police Academy of the Czech Republic in Prague by the team of Bedřich Šesták, Zdeněk Kovařík, Lenka Jakubcová (Czech Republic) and Assoc. Vladimír Blažek (Slovak Republic). The results of three independent surveys were merged here – the first: (research within the Czech Republic with 233 respondents), the second (research within the Slovak Republic with 407 respondents) and the third (research with Czech BIS experts with 57 respondents), the last being realized via an anonymous and voluntary research questionnaire with members of the central analytics of the Security Information Service (BIS). This achieved a greater refinement of the factor composition of the security threats, with the original five-factor structure remaining unchanged. However, the authors propose to modify the names of the second (migration) and fifth factors (energy, raw materials, industry), which would take into account the importance of terrorist threats and undesirable climate changes. It can be stated that the present factor composition of individual threats appears to be more appropriate and that the values of regression coefficients are not primary for making conclusions. The authors also point out the importance of exploratory factor analysis in the reduction of variables and in the structure of security threat composition. In the future, they recommend the use of confirmatory factor analysis with a significanty extended sample size.
Keywords: Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, exploratory factor analysis, regression coefficient, security threats, factor structure of security threats.