In coping with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), infection control measures are a key aspect of protecting healthcare workers. We conducted a survey concerning perception of risk and countermeasures for SARS in 7 tertiary hospitals in Japan from July through September 2003, immediately after the SARS epidemic in neighboring countries. Based on 7,282 respondents out of 9,978 questionnair...

This work operationalizes the determinants of climate change risk, exposure and vulnerability, through the perceptions held by Native hunters, fishers, and gatherers in Savoonga and Shaktoolik, Alaska. Informed by their skill, experience, and the traditional knowledge of their elders, hunters, fishers, and gatherers in these communities are astute observers of their environment and environmenta...

The presented survey investigates risk and exposure perceptions of radio frequency electromagnetic fields (RF EMF) associated with base stations, mobile phones and other sources, the key issue being the interaction between both sets of perceptions. The study is based on a cross-sectional design, and conducted with an online sample of 838 citizens from Portugal. The results indicate that respond...

Understanding the determinants of individuals’ perceptions of their risk of becoming infected with HIV and their perceptions of acceptable strategies of prevention is an essential step towards curtailing the spread of this disease. We focus in this paper on learning and decision-making about AIDS in the context of high uncertainty about the disease and appropriate behavioral responses, and we a...

Most peer influence research examines socialization between adolescents and their best friends. Yet, adolescents also are influenced by popular peers, perhaps due to misperceptions of social norms. This research examined the extent to which out-group and in-group adolescents misperceive the frequencies of peers' deviant, health risk, and adaptive behaviors in different reputation-based peer cro...

THE TOPIC of mortality risk perceptions has somehow failed to engage the interest of demographers. Perhaps this is because in demography, as in social science more generally, the passage from socioeconomic change to individual perceptions of change has been assumed to be immediate, or to involve lags of little consequence. If individual perceptions adjust quickly to changing empirical realities...

Over the Great Moderation period in the United States, we find that corporate credit spreads embed crucial information about the one-year-ahead probability of recession, as evidenced by both inand out-of-sample fit. Furthermore, the incidence of “false positive” predictions of recession is dramatically reduced by utilizing a bivariate model that includes a measure of credit spreads along with t...

"This study uses data on perceived and actual mortality risks to test several alternative Bayesian models of the factors influencing risk beliefs. The analysis...indicates that while the hazard rate for the individual age group is an influential factor, the overall population death rate and the discounted expected number of life years lost due to the cause of death are also influential in affec...