Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

In recent years, safety performance of buildings has advanced remarkably by the development of disaster prevention facilities. However their systematic functions have not been improved enough for users' security feelings. As for a tall or large-scale building, the potential risk is rapidly growing according to the increase of both the size of space and the complication of functions which psychologically influences to safety senses of the users. Even if a building is built according to legal standards and some experts ensure the safety, the users wouldn't always have feelings of security. Safety standards including individual safety, i.e. security, are becoming more indispensable through enlargement and complication of buildings. Human sense of security is variable according to age, sex, race, knowledge, environment, and so forth. In Japan, the population of elderly people is increasing, which causes a considerable change of security sense. For renovating buildings safety, we have to understand what the sense of both safety and security is, together with the relationship between them, which would be helpful to establish some kind of evaluation method for fire safety in buildings. In this study, we present questionnaires to fire fighting personnel and college students in architectural course, so as to examine how to grasp "safety" and "security" through their knowledges or experiences on disaster prevention. As a result, it was found that persons with less knowledges on disaster prevention felt uneasy about various disasters, which induces a cause of panic, and security was psychologically allocated among individual safety senses including healthy features.