A complex social system consists of a variety of social elements and processes. One of the crucial problems which social researchers try to understand and explain is how social order and collective phenomena emerge from individual behaviours, and what the specific features of a particular type of social aggregate are. Another important problem is the application of appropriate research methods that allow explication of the distinctiveness of social reality. Recently there has been increased interest in the use of agent-based modelling, social network analysis, and socio-physics. These novel approaches often treat social phenomena as any other physical phenomena. We believe that these methods should take into account peculiarities of social realm in greater extent. We would like to discuss some of these novel approaches with placing special attention on some methodological problems that result from usage of models for investigation of complex social behaviours. In this paper we discuss the problem of macroscopic effects of microscopic forces using social constructions of security and threat as an example.