BACKGROUND Accurate measurement of people's risk perceptions is important for numerous bodies of research and in clinical practice, but there is no consensus about the best measure. OBJECTIVE This study evaluated three measures of women's breast cancer risk perception by assessing their psychometric and test characteristics. DESIGN A cross-sectional mailed survey to women from a primary car...

This article uses the panel survey developed for the Health and Retirement Study to evaluate whether Hurricane Andrew in 1992 altered longevity expectations of respondents who lived in Dade County, Florida, the location experiencing the majority of about 20 billion dollars of damage. Longevity expectations have been used as a proxy measure for both individual subjective risk assessments and dis...

Through a case study of small-scale Kaqchikel Maya farmers involved in non-traditional export agriculture (NTAX) in the Central Guatemalan highlands, this article examines the tensions between the mostly positive perceptions of farmers and the negative assessments of many who study NTAX production. In a context of severe political-economic structural inequalities and potentially high social and...

We investigate the structure of individuals’ rankings of uncertain prospects in terms of risk and their relationship to individual preferences. We examine three interlinked propositions that are fundamental to the standard economic approach to risk: (i) that risk-rankings respect the principle of mean-preserving spreads; (ii) that rankings by risk are simply the reverse of ranking by preference...

BACKGROUND According to the Risk Perception Attitude (RPA) framework, classifying people according to their perceptions of disease risk and their self-efficacy beliefs allows us to predict their likelihood for engaging in preventive behaviors. Health interventions can then be targeted according to RPA group. We applied the framework to type 2 diabetes prevention behaviors among American Indians...

Several opinion polls have reported that many people claim to be concerned about their privacy, yet that most people in fact do very little to protect their privacy. Are privacy concerns indeed insufficient motivators to adopt privacy protection strategies? What then characterizes the users of these strategies? On the basis of a large scale survey amongst Dutch students, this paper explores the...

Translucent security argues for the integration of the human element in the design of secure systems and secure components in a systematic manner. The following work details the theoretical arguments for translucent security and enumerates the principles behind the approach. After briefly listing the principles, the browser experience is critiqued for lack of translucence. Straight-forward chan...

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 toward curtailing the spread of this disease. We focus in this article on learning and decision-making about AIDS in the context of high uncertainty about the disease and appropriate behavioral responses. We argu...

Natural hazard research began as a study of cultural perceptions to extreme naturally occurring events. Since the advent of the study, natural hazard literature has become steeped in terminology that is sometimes confusing to the reader. The concepts of hazard, risk, and disaster are often confused with one another and with the extreme event itself. Although the extreme event is inherent in haz...