| 1. |
- Lindbladh, Eva, et al.
(författare)
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Polarization in the reaction to health-risk information: a question of social position?
- 2003
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Ingår i: Risk Analysis: an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis. - : Wiley. - 1539-6924. ; 23:4, s. 841-855
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Dissemination of risk information is ubiquitous in contemporary society. We explore how individuals react in everyday life to health-risk information, based on what they report in personal interviews. Health-risk information was without exception recognized as unstable and inconsistent. This conformity, however, did not extend to the narratives regarding how health-risk information should be handled. Two opposite positions (ideal-typical strategies) are presented. Either you tend to process and evaluate new information or you tend to ignore it as a whole. Our attempt to reveal the underlying rationality in these two very different approaches involved the exploration of three different avenues of interpretation and brings together two scientific paradigms—economics and sociology—that provide the framework for our analysis. First, we suggest that a greater long-term experience of explicit choice implies that this kind of action becomes more natural and less resource consuming, whereas a reliance on habits in daily life—a natural adjustment to a lack of resources—makes it is more costly to bother about new information. Second, with fewer resources in the short run, fewer opportunities to mitigate bad outcomes, and greater exposure to social and material risks, one is less likely to devote resources to deal with health-risk information. Third, there are several possible links between a low propensity to take account of risk information and a high relative importance of genuine uncertainty in one's life. These theoretical perspectives provide a viable set of hypotheses regarding mechanisms that may contribute to social differences in the response to health-risk information.
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| 2. |
- Bengtsson, Göran, et al.
(författare)
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A Spatial Approach to Environmental Risk Assessment of PAH Contamination.
- 2009
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Ingår i: Risk Analysis: an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis. - : Wiley. - 1539-6924. ; 29:1, s. 48-61
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The extent of remediation of contaminated industrial sites depends on spatial heterogeneity of contaminant concentration and spatially explicit risk characterization. We used sequential Gaussian simulation (SGS) and indicator kriging (IK) to describe the spatial distribution of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), pH, electric conductivity, particle aggregate distribution, water holding capacity, and total organic carbon, and quantitative relations among them, in a creosote polluted soil in southern Sweden. The geostatistical analyses were combined with risk analyses, in which the total toxic equivalent concentration of the PAH mixture was calculated from the soil concentrations of individual PAHs and compared with ecotoxicological effect concentrations and regulatory threshold values in block sizes of 1.8 x 1.8 m. Most PAHs were spatially autocorrelated and appeared in several hot spots. The risk calculated by SGS was more confined to specific hot spot areas than the risk calculated by IK, and 40-50% of the site had PAH concentrations exceeding the threshold values with a probability of 80% and higher. The toxic equivalent concentration of the PAH mixture was dependent on the spatial distribution of organic carbon, showing the importance of assessing risk by a combination of measurements of PAH and organic carbon concentrations. Essentially, the same risk distribution pattern was maintained when Monte Carlo simulations were used for implementation of risk in larger (5 x 5 m), economically more feasible remediation blocks, but a smaller area became of great concern for remediation when the simulations included PAH partitioning to two separate sources, creosote and natural, of organic matter, rather than one general.
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| 3. |
- Picado, Francisco, et al.
(författare)
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Ecological, Groundwater, and Human Health Risk Assessment in a Mining Region of Nicaragua
- 2010
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Ingår i: Risk Analysis: an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis. - : Wiley. - 1539-6924. ; 30:6, s. 916-933
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Macroinvertebrates and fish in the contaminated river are faced with a higher risk to suffer from exposure to Hg than humans eating contaminated fish and bacteria living in the groundwater. The river sediment is the most hazardous source for the macroinvertebrates, and macroinvertebrates make up the highest risk for fish. The distribution of body concentrations of Hg in fish in the mining areas of the basin may exceed the distribution of endpoint values with close to 100% probability. Similarly, the Hg concentration in cord blood of humans feeding on fish from the river was predicted to exceed the BMDLs(0.1) with about 10% probability. Most of the risk to the groundwater quality is confined to the vicinity of the gold refining plants and along the river, with a probability of about 20% to exceed the guideline value.
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| 4. |
- Winslott Hiselius, Lena
(författare)
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Using choice experiments to assess people's preferences for railway transports of hazardous materials
- 2005
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Ingår i: Risk Analysis: an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis. - : Wiley. - 1539-6924. ; 25:5, s. 1199-1214
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article investigates whether the choice experiment approach can be used to assess people's preferences and the determinants of these preferences in order to estimate the costs and benefits of different configurations of the transport of hazardous materials by rail. Changes in the exposure to hazardous materials that people are subjected to are used rather than changes in accident risk. To the best knowledge of the author, this has not been done before in a study of people's preferences toward hazardous materials. A mail survey, carried out in two cities in Sweden, is used to obtain tentative estimates of the willingness to pay for a reduction in exposure as well as the willingness to accept an increase in exposure. Special attention is given to viability, since the complexity of the activity studied, transport of hazardous materials, and the method used pose particular challenges. The response rate and tests of validity and consistency indicate that this method can be applied. Moreover, the results suggest that studies of this kind may provide guidance on changes in the transport of hazardous materials, especially because policymakers may influence the attributes presented here. Referring to the exposure of hazardous materials highlights the importance of providing the respondents with adequate information regarding hazardous transports. An important finding is that the amount of background information may have some effect on the stated preferences.
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| 5. |
- Fromm, Jana, et al.
(författare)
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Information technology risks as seen by the public
- 2001
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Ingår i: Risk Analysis. - : Wiley. - 1539-6924 .- 0272-4332. ; 21:3, s. 427-442
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Risks related to information technology (IT) are becoming a focus of concern in current risk debates. The use of IT is rapidly spreading in the population, as is access to computers in general. The present article reviews the literature on IT use (especially electronic mail and various Internet applications) and the related risks. In addition, the results from a survey about IT use and risk perception, given to a random sample of the Swedish population, are reported. In general, participants were quite positive to IT and were, to some extent, aware of the related risks. However, risks of IT were mostly seen as pertinent to other people, a finding in contrast with other results on perceived technology hazards. The attitude toward the use of IT was strongly related to general attitude toward computers, and less clearly to risk perception. Only a small percentage of the respondents reported having had negative experiences with IT hazards such as Internet addiction, depression, and social isolation. When extrapolated to the general population, however, these small percentages amount to large groups in the population that have been negatively affected by IT use.
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| 6. |
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| 7. |
- Peterson, Martin
(författare)
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The limits of catastrophe aversion
- 2002
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Ingår i: Risk Analysis. - : Wiley. - 0272-4332 .- 1539-6924. ; 22:3, s. 527-538
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We discuss the management of catastrophe-risks from a theoretical point of view. The concept of a catastrophe is informally and formally defined, and a number of desiderata for catastrophe-averse decision rules are introduced. However, the proposed desiderata turn out to be mutually inconsistent. As a consequence of this result, it is argued that the "rigid" form of catastrophe aversion articulated by, for example, the maximin rule, the maximum probable loss rule, (some versions of) the precautionary principle, and the rule proposed in Ekenberg et al. (1997, 2000) should be given up. An alternative form of "non-rigid" catastrophe aversion is considered.
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
- Sjöberg, Lennart
(författare)
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Are received risk perception models alive and well?
- 2002
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Ingår i: Risk Analysis. - : Wiley. - 1539-6924 .- 0272-4332. ; 22:4, s. 665-669
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Recension (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Two recent papers on risk perception models are discussed. In these papers, quantitative analyses are presented of risk perception in relation to risk characteristics as specified in the Psychometric Model, and to cultural biases according to Cultural Theory. This comment points out that the data quality of these two studies is doubtful, with a very small convenience sample and a very low response rate. More importantly, the analyses show the same low levels of explained variance of risk perception as other researchers have found previously, but the authors still draw optimistic conclusions from their data. Such conclusions are unjustified.
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| 10. |
- Sjöberg, Lennart
(författare)
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Factors in Risk Perception
- 2000
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Ingår i: Risk analysis. - : Blackwell Publishers Inc. - 1539-6924 .- 0272-4332. ; 20:1, s. 1-12
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Risk perception is a phenomenon in search of an explanation. Several approaches are discussed in this paper. Technical risk estimates are sometimes a potent factor in accounting for perceived risk, but in many important applications it is not. Heuristics and biases, mainly availability, account for only a minor portion of risk perception, and media contents have not been clearly implicated in risk perception. The psychometric model is probably the leading contender in the field, but its explanatory value is only around 20% of the variance of raw data. Adding a factor of “unnatural risk” considerably improves the psychometric model. Cultural Theory, on the other hand, has not been able to explain more than 5–10% of the variance of perceived risk, and other value scales have similarly failed. A model is proposed in which attitude, risk sensitivity, and specific fear are used as explanatory variables; this model seems to explain well over 30–40% of the variance and is thus more promising than previous approaches. The model offers a different type of psychological explanation of risk perception, and it has many implications, e.g., a different approach to the relationship between attitude and perceived risk, as compared with the usual cognitive analysis of attitude.
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