Environmental Risk Exposure,Risk Perception,Political Ideology and Support for Climate Policy

The degree to which risk perceptions are socially constructed versus the result of actual exposure to risk is highly contested; how risk exposure and risk perception influence policy attitudes is also poorly understood. We examine how personal exposure to risk factors impacts risk perceptions and policy support related to air pollution and climate change. Our selection of risk exposure variables is informed by the “mental models” literature, and we employ an array of variables to capture subjective risk perceptions using novel survey data. We find that exposure to risk does little to predict risk perception and has a small influence on policy support. Overall, our findings lend support to a constructionist understanding of risk perception and support for policies related to environmental risks.     

Social Capital,Place Meanings,and Perceived Resilience to Climate Change*

This research analyzes individuals' perceived resilience to changing climatic conditions. Specifically, we suggest individual resilience is composed of an awareness of localized risks created because of climate change, a willingness to learn about, and plan for, the potential impacts of altered environmental conditions, and general appraisals of personal adaptive capacities. We hypothesize that resilience is influenced by the characteristics of individuals' social networks and also by their social-psychological dependence on local environments. Using data collected in three resource-associated communities within the southeastern United States, our analysis suggests bonding ties may limit individuals' willingness to seek new information about the potential impacts of climate change. Conversely, the data suggest the use of a diverse array of bridging ties is positively associated with information-seeking behavior. The data also support our hypothesis that individuals' social psychological dependencies on the local environment influences their perceived resilience to changing climatic conditions. By gaining a clearer understanding of how individuals' social networks and social-psychological dependencies affect their perceived ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions, decision makers can focus on policy solutions that increase adaptive capacities and build social resilience.     

Queering Climate Change: Exploring the Influence of LGBTQ+ Identity on Climate Change Belief and Risk Perceptions*

Although researchers have broadly addressed how race, party identification, political ideology, and binary gender categories influence climate change opinions, little attention has been paid to the relationship between sexuality and gender variance (LGBTQ+ identity broadly) and climate change perceptions. Using a quota-based survey from 2022 that approximates the US population on key demographic characteristics and oversamples LGBTQ+ individuals, we assess the degree to which LGBTQ+ individuals' climate change beliefs and risk perceptions are comparable to cisgender, heterosexual (cishet) individuals, specifically examining climate change beliefs, the perceived threat climate change poses, and worry about climate change. We argue that LGBTQ+ individuals' views are likely to be distinct from their cisgender heterosexual (cishet) counterparts for three reasons: climate change is likely to exacerbate existing structural inequalities, create disaster responses that reinforce heteronormative and discriminatory patterns, and activate LGBTQ+ political culture. We find evidence that LGBTQ+ individuals express higher agreement with climate change beliefs, identify climate change as a greater threat, and worry more about climate change when compared to their cishet counterparts.     

Risk,trust and knowledge networks in farmers’ learning

This study reports on New Zealand dairy farmers’ access to and use of information as mediated through conditions of risk and trust within the context of their interpersonal social networks. We located participants’ reports of their information use within their perceived environments of trust and risk, following Giddens's [1990. The consequences of modernity. Polity Press, Stanford, CA] typology of trust and risk in pre-modernity and modernity. The research participants were constant users of interpersonal and print information from numerous sources, and monitored their incoming data in the light of strategic needs, reflecting their roles as both farming practitioners and business owners. Socio-spatial knowledge networks (SSKNs) combine individuals’ explanatory cognitive models of information acquisition and use with a micro-geographical analysis of their interpersonal networks. The participants showed characteristics of pre-modern, modern and even post-modern society in respect of their use of complex interactional forms, as well as a blending of individualistic and communitarian practices and concerns in their professional and personal lives.     

Adolescents' Self-Reported Risk Factors and Desire to Talk About Family and Friends

Summary

Adolescents entering an urban mental health program completed Adquest, an 80-item self-report inventory asking about important areas in their life such as school and education, work, health, sexuality, substance abuse, personal and family life. This article examines how much adolescents wanted to talk about family and friends with their counselors, gender and age differences in this desire, and how that is mediated by behavioral risk factors. Irrespective of the existence of coping problems and behavioral risks, adolescents expressed a strong desire to discuss family, and, to a lesser extent, friends, in counseling. From a clinical standpoint, this finding highlights Adquest's limitations because it is based on an individual, behavioral risk paradigm rather than on more systemic factors in the lives of these adolescents. Implications regarding the use of practice-based research to facilitate reflective practice are discussed.     

Risk Preferences and Immigration Attitudes: Evidence from Four East Asian Countries

Economic interests, such as increased job market competition or tax burden in the host countries, often explain attitudes toward immigration. Some empirical studies that have adopted this economic perspective report, however, that an individual's economic circumstances are not directly linked to his or her attitudes toward immigration, emphasizing that people can have different interpretations even under the same circumstances. We argue that risk preferences (i.e., willingness to take risks) shape personal perceptions about the costs and benefits of immigrant workers in the job market and immigration. Using the 2008 East Asian Social Survey from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, we find that individuals who like to take more risks are more likely to be positive about immigration. Our study indicates the importance of psychological tendency in the formation of native citizens' attitudes toward immigration.     

Life politics,nature and the state: Giddens' sociological theory and The Politics of Climate Change

Anthony Giddens' The Politics of Climate Change represents a significant shift in the way in which he addresses ecological politics. In this book, he rejects the relevance of environmentalism and demarcates climate‐change policy from life politics. Giddens addresses climate change in the technocratic mode of simple rather than reflexive modernization. However, Giddens' earlier sociological theory provides the basis for a more reflexive understanding of climate change. Climate change instantiates how, in high modernity, the existential contradiction of the human relationship with nature returns in new form, expressed in life politics and entangled with the structural contradictions of the capitalist state. The interlinking of existential and structural contradiction is manifested in the tension between life politics and the capitalist nation‐state. This tension is key for understanding the failures so far of policy responses to climate change.     

Key Worker Services for Disabled Children: the Views of Parents

This study reports the findings from 68 interviews with parents of disabled children who are users of seven key worker schemes in England and Wales. The interviews which lasted for one hour each, were tape‐recorded, transcribed and analysed according to both a priori and emerging themes. The findings from this study have implications for policy and practice, for example, the necessity of protected time for key workers, the necessity of conveying clear information about the key worker's role, the importance of access to training and information for the key worker, the need for key workers to be proactive, and for their involvement in care plan and review meetings. Copyright © 2006 The Author(s). Journal compilation © 2006 National Children's Bureau     

On Childhood and Risk: An Exploration of Children's Everyday Experiences in Rural Peru

Drawing on data from Peru, this article explores how poverty mediates diverse risks in rural children's lives. It offers four main arguments. First, risk is not simply a feature of ‘extraordinary’ childhoods, but integral to everyday, ‘ordinary’ lives. Second, children's responses to adversity are crucially shaped by sociomoral considerations. Third, children participate actively in household risk mitigation, their engagement structured by individual (biographical) and collective factors. Fourth, changing circumstances present new opportunities and challenges for children living with adversity. Current approaches focusing on so‐called ‘objective’ risks neglect children's own priorities and subjective experiences.     

Solar Festivals and Climate Bills: Comparing NGO Climate Change Campaigns in the UK and Australia

This paper compares climate change campaigns conducted by environmental nongovernment organizations (NGOs) in the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia. The NGOs represent a diversity of political access, financial resources, and international connections. Three campaign activities common to both countries undertaken between 2004 and 2006 are analyzed for their effectiveness via interviews and document review. This examination is embedded within an analysis of the political, economic, policy, and social contexts of each country. It is shown that in the UK climate change has been used as a pivotal leadership issue, that the fossil fuel industry’s influence is not predominant, and that NGOs enjoy political legitimacy. Whereas, in Australia climate change has only recently emerged as a political priority, the fossil fuel industry has had significant political and financial influence, and NGO advocacy has been marginalized. It is argued that NGOs are embedded in the political and policy contexts of their country, and the greatest campaign traction and NGO influence can only be achieved when these contexts provide favorable conditions.

The Self-Care Center for Cuts: A Model for Student Development

Abstract

We conducted a study to determine whether an intervention using self-care information would change college students' attitudes and beliefs concerning personal responsibility and involvement in their own health care. Individuals entering a student health service were randomly assigned to a treatment or control group. Members of the treatment group (n = 187) received the intervention and completed the survey instrument. Members of the control group (n = 204) completed the survey instrument only. The intervention consisted of one page of general information about the benefits to individuals of taking responsibility for their own health and a booklet containing excerpts from a consumer-oriented health care book. The survey instrument was composed of a measure of attitudes toward information and behavioral involvement in health care and a measure of beliefs regarding control over one's health. Results indicated that the intervention was able to change the treatment group's attitudes regarding active participation in health care. The treatment group's responses also reflected less belief that health was outside of the individual's control. The study showed that a positive change in health-related attitudes and beliefs can result from a relatively uncomplicated informational intervention.     

Forced Migration,Climate Change,Mitigation and Adaptive Policies in Mexico: Some Functional Relationships

Natural disasters related to hydro-meteorological events have increased during the last few decades, both in frequency and severity. Mexico is heavily exposed to climate change, but has also suffered in the past from climate variability ( Blümel, 2009 ). The new risks oblige the government to develop mitigation processes, while the affected people are implementing strategies of adaptation and resilience-building, mostly at the family and community level. This includes forced migration due to climate change into the slums of megacities or illegal immigration to the United States. The arid, semi-arid and subhumid condition of 49.2 per cent of the territory of Mexico is seriously affected by climate change. In addition, poverty and the lack of jobs have created complex livelihood situations, in which young people leave rural areas, partly due to socio-economic pull factors. In this paper, we address the functional relationships between climate patterns and migration processes in Mexico, highlighting the linkages between the origin of migrants, their economic activity and their vulnerability to extreme events and we discuss long-term climate patterns. Agriculture still uses 78 per cent of the available water in Mexico. In the drylands the competition for water use requires an integrated policy to deal with the new threats from climate change, including mitigation from the top down and adaptation processes from the bottom up to reduce the social vulnerability of the rural population in the highly affected drylands of the central and northern parts of Mexico. The new policy for administering water resources, which promotes the efficient use of an increasingly scarce and polluted resource, still suffers from a lack of participation by the affected rural population. In this paper, we propose an integrated management system from the watershed onwards, involving socio-economic, political, cultural and hydrological variables, to deal with the rising scarcity of water, and the uncertainty and complexity of climate change.     

Risk,Recovery and Capacity: Competing or Complementary Approaches to Mental Health Social Work

Mental health social workers have a central role in providing support to people with mental health problems and in the use of coercion aimed at dealing with risk. Mental health services have traditionally focused on monitoring symptoms and ascertaining the risks people may present to themselves or others. This well-intentioned but negative focus on deficits has contributed to stigma, discrimination, and exclusion experienced by service users. Emerging understandings of risk also suggest that our inability to accurately predict the future makes risk a problematic foundation for compulsory intervention. Therefore it is argued that alternative approaches are needed to make issues of power and inequality transparent. This article focuses on two areas of practice: the use of recovery-based approaches, which promote supported decision-making and inclusion; and the assessment of a person's ability to make decisions, their mental capacity, as a less discriminatory gateway criterion than risk for compulsory intervention.     

Child survival,poverty, and labor in Africa

Children in Africa face harsh risks and are often subjected to hostile environments that severely limit their emotional, mental, physical, and social growth and development. That, in turn, significantly limits their prospects for childhood survival, increases their chances of having to enter into employment voluntarily or forcibly, and makes them susceptible to poverty. This paper examines and analyzes the plight of Africa's children in the context of the risks they face with respect to their mortality, their socio-economic security, and their engagement in economic activities. The trends and contributory factors are discussed and an analytical assessment is offered with policy implications for mitigating the consequences of child mortality, poverty, and labor on the African continent.     

CATASTROPHE AND RATIONAL POLICY: CASE OF NATIONAL SECURITY

Predicting catastrophes involves heavy‐tailed distributions with no mean, eluding proactive policy as expected cost‐benefit analysis fails. We study US government counterterrorism policy, given heightened risk of terrorism. But terrorism also involves human behavior. We synthesize the behavioral and statistical aspects in an adversary‐defender game. Calibration to extensive data shows that where a Weibull distribution is the best predictor, US counterterrorism policy is rational (and optimal). Here, we estimate the adversary's unobserved variables, e.g., difficulty of an attack. We also find cases where the best predictor is a Generalized‐Pareto with no finite mean and rational policy fails. Here, we offer “work‐arounds”. (JEL H56, D81, C46)     

Media Constructions of Risk and Safety: Differential Framings of Hazard Events*

The media play an important role in the social construction of risk and safety. In this article, we analyze how reports in a New Orleans newspaper defined the risk and safety associated with a series of four events during the summer of 1988: a drought, low water levels in the Mississippi River, a saltwater intrusion, and toxic pollution in local bodies of water. The newspaper reports defined some of the events as hazards by assessing their negative consequences and, in turn, defined them as specific kinds of hazards by identifying their causes. Specifically, we found that the reports defined the nonlocal consequences of an event as more varied and severe than its local consequences. Further, the reports consistently defined each of the events as natural events rather than attributing their causes to social or technological events or conditions. Our results suggest the importance of news sources, economic and political power, and a preference for monocausal frames in the social construction of news. Our results also suggest the importance of local cultural world views in defining hazards and risks. We use the findings to suggest avenues for future research and theory.     

Running out of time: A qualitative investigation of homeless men’s access to health services

Abstract

This study examined health beliefs and health care utilisation among 20 homeless men in Liverpool, through the voices of homeless men themselves. Using semi-structured interviews and framework analysis, narratives highlighted the interplay between the limiting structures of the health care system and an individual's ability to know how to seek out health care in order to improve their own health. Specifically, we found that individual agency was contingent on the availability of a set of minimum resources, to which homeless men did not have access. These findings have important implications in terms of practical policy recommendations for improving health care utilisation among the homeless.     

Climate Change and Societal Response: Livelihoods,Communities, and the Environment

Climate change may be considered a natural disaster evolving in slow motion on a global scale. Increasing storm intensities, shifting rainfall patterns, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and other manifold alterations are being experienced around the world. Climate has never been constant in any location, but human‐induced changes associated with greenhouse gases and fossil fuel use are new and rapidly shifting conditions for rural communities and regions across the planet. Rural sociologists have long been carving out the contours of this topic through research on family well‐being, rural livelihoods, community, and the environment. Now climate change and subsequent policy responses present a new and fundamental source of social change. The purpose of this article is to assess lines of research and theory that consider and direct our understanding of the impacts of climate change, the ways it might be mitigated, and the coping strategies of rural people and communities that are both victims and perpetrators in the global realignment. As climate‐change impacts and policy responses begin to impinge on rural populations, the first line of resistance and participation will be the rural community. The distribution of rewards from climate‐change mitigation is broad and diffuse; the distribution of costs, compromised livelihoods, and community disruption often is focused.     

Disability and climate change: A critical realist model of climate justice

Existing literature on climate change as an issue of environmental justice documents the heightened vulnerability of people with disabilities to the effects of climate change. Additionally, there are numerous studies showing that access to information is a prerequisite for perceiving risk and taking action. Building on this work, our review seeks to understand how physical disability relates to perceptions of climate-related risk and adaptations to climate-related events. We introduce a critical realist model of climate justice to understand the relationships between the environmental features that disable, risk perception and information seeking, and adaptive capacity and resilience to climate change. In understanding the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of people with disabilities to climate change, this review synthesizes research on one of the U.S.’s largest minority communities with the goals of better understanding how vulnerable populations cope with climate change and integrating them into climate action and policy.     

Gendered Policies and Practices that Increase Older Men's Risk of Elder Mistreatment

SUMMARY

We aim to detail some of the ways that social policy and gendered practices put older men at risk of elder mistreatment. Research on the abuse and neglect that older adults experience has often focused on the characteristics of the victims and the dynamics within families, emphasizing factors such as the likelihood of an intergenerational cycle of violence, substance abuse and dependency, and older men's financial status as key risks in elder abuse. The effect on men from this type of analysis is that elder mistreatment remains an individual or family problem rather than being viewed as a larger societal concern. This article challenges the individualistic focus by outlining the importance of societal forces affecting older men's risk of mistreatment.