Potentially life-threatening food allergies are increasing among children in the Western world. Informed by childhood studies, this article explores young people's management of food allergy risk and highlights their agency in relation to food, eating and place. Drawing on individual interviews with 10 young people who took part in a larger multi-method study of young people's experiences of food allergies, the findings demonstrate that the management of health risks means, to some extent, trying to control the uncontrollable. A reaction can occur at any time and to experience a severe reaction entails a temporarily loss of control. The strategies the young people develop to avoid allergic reactions can be understood both as responses to this uncertainty and as manifestations of their agency. Their risk experiences vary with place; at school and in other public places they face social as well as health risks. What we see is not agency as a voluntary choice but that young people with food allergies experience tensions between their own competence to manage different types of risks and their dependence on others to adjust to their needs. Thus, the relational aspects of young people's agency come to the fore.

Food allergy is an illness that requires constant risk management in everyday life. To date, there is no cure or preventive treatment, and the only way to manage the condition is therefore careful avoidance of the offending foodstuff and treatment of reactions when they occur. This article draws on a socio-cultural approach to explore parents' understandings and management of child food allergy in the context of everyday life, as 'situated' risk. A focus group study was carried out with 31 parents of children diagnosed with food allergy at two children's hospitals. The analysis of the focus group material reveals how the management of allergy risk seems to permeate most aspects of everyday life as well as how the parents draw on a dominant norm of risk avoidance as well as a counter-discourse of calculated risk taking. The patterns of risk management found in this study are discussed in terms of how risk avoidance and risk taking are intertwined and balanced in the context of moral parenthood.

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Western culture can be seen as permeated by risk-consciousness. In particular, parents are under scrutiny in their roles as risk managers. In this article, we address parental experiences of children more at risk than others, children with food allergy, and the management of allergy risk in everyday life. Drawing on a notion of risk as 'situated' in local everyday life, we argue that a further exploration of parental understandings of child food allergy risk would benefit from an analysis of studies across different local contexts. In this article we draw on a secondary qualitative cross-cultural analysis of interview data from several studies of parents in Sweden and Scotland through 2006-10, which focussed on parents' understandings of the nature of food allergy and the children's management of the allergy risk. We found some common themes in the different data sets. First, food allergy was depicted as life-threatening, a 'death risk' lurking in the background, more or less constantly present in different everyday situations, amounting to an existential condition in parenting. Second, food allergy risk was seen as a relational phenomenon, meaning that the risk emerged in the encounter between the young person's individual competence to manage allergy risk and the understandings of allergy risk in others ─ thus depending on contexts and interaction between several actors. These aspects of food allergy were discussed in terms of unpredictability and risk in constant flux, the ways risk and trust were related as well as how the involvement of others could be seen as a risk and a safeguard.

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In most questionnaire studies there are some subjects who do not respond, and the response rate is viewed as an indicator representative of the sample population (1). The critical issue is how the results should be interpreted because of non-response bias. In a comprehensive review of characteristics of respondents and non-respondents in medical surveys, it has been found that current smoking is associated with non-response (2), a connection that is recurrent in different types of surveys (3-6). There are recommendations that non-respondents should be classified as smokers (7). A great number of smoking cessation methods have been developed over the years (8). Abrams has described various types by their level of intervention: minimum, moderate, and intensive intervention (9). Minimum intervention comprises self-help material and other types of support. Moderate intervention comprises self-help material with access to brief advice and support from, for example, healthcare personnel. Intensive intervention comprises treatment at smoking cessation clinics with specially trained personnel.One example of a minimum intervention method for aiding tobacco-users to quit is the &dquo;Quit and Win&dquo;contest, a method based on a number of different theories and models, such as self-efficacy, locus of control, stages-of-change, and persuasion (10). The contest was first introduced in the Nordic countries, in 1985 in Finland and in 1988 in Sweden. During the 1990s the method has been diffused rapidly and applied worldwide in several countries by the WHO's Cindy Program (11).In this study, which is based on a one-year followup of participants from a national &dquo;Quit and Win&dquo; contest in Sweden in 1994 (12), we studied the bias in smoking prevalence because of the non-response. The participants in this contest were recruited mainly via mass-media efforts and at the workplace and had to remain tobacco-free for four weeks. The participants signed up for the contest by sending in a registration form.The statistical analysis has been completed, based on three approaches to assess the non-response bias: in the first approach, a univariate analysis, the participants were studied based on their response behavior and socio-demographic factors along with tobacco habits. The second approach, also a univariate analysis, was carried out to study the extent to which the participants had remained tobacco-free, and compared respondents who returned questionnaires after the initial request with those who responded after the first or second reminder letter, or who were interviewed by telephone at a later date. Finally, the third approach dealt with the rate of tobacco-free persons, and involved a comparison between the participants who responded to the questionnaire and those who were interviewed by telephone.The significance of non-response on the rate of tobacco-free individuals during a twelve-month period has been estimated through various assumptions. A pre-and post-test design using data from the participants entry forms and twel...

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