The influence of popular media on perceptions of personal and population risk in possible disease outbreaks

The Impact of Medical Terminology in Self-Triage Decision-Making

“…The use of healthy undergraduates and hypothetical health scenarios to investigate the urgency to seek care has been used previously (Cooper and Humphreys, 2008;Hall et al, 2010), and a similar population and questionnairebased experimental approach were used here to determine the influence, if any, of medical terminology on self-triage decisionmaking. If this influence can be established, this will be a clear addition to previous findings indicating that medical terminology can influence perceptions of risk Topolinski and Strack, 2010;Young et al, 2013;Dohle and Siegrist, 2014;Tasso et al, 2014), and perceptions of severity and disease status (Young et al, 2008).…”

“…However, some research suggests that this influence of language may be limited to newly medicalized disorders-disorders where the medical language is still quite new, and perhaps poorly recognized (Young et al, 2008) and that this use of medical language may be involved in changing public perceptions of newly medicalized disorders (Young et al, 2008). But perceptions of severity, disease representativeness, prevalence, and personal risk (Young et al, 2013) may not be perfectly analogous to patient decisions of when to seek care (i.e. self-triage decision-making).…”

Health care through the ‘lens of risk’: reflections on the recent series of four special issues

“…Just two of the 23 substantive papers drew in whole or in part on quantitative methods (Kayali and Iqbal, 2012;Young, King, Harper and Humphreys, 2013), a pattern which reflects the overall preference for qualitative methods in current interpretive social science. But the papers demonstrate the potential for quantifying risk perceptions, as against objectified risks which have been divorced from their observers.…”

“…With regard, thirdly, to the construction of uncertain expectations, the published articles were concerned with: the complexities of drawing on probabilistic information derived from screening to inform medical decision-making (Austin, Reventlow, Sandøe and Brodersen, 2013); the underestimated impact of the hindsight effect on retrospective blaming in child protection cases (Kearney, 2013); the unreflectively self-fuelling approach through which the accumulation of file-notes in child protection cases comes to be viewed as itself a risk indicator (Stanley, 2013); the inductive prevention paradox, whereby prophylactic measures erase the inductive evidence which might have informed assessment of their utility, in this case for forensic mental health service-users being considered for discharge from secure accommodation (Heyman, Godin, Reynolds and Davies, 2013); media influences on public perceptions about probabilities of disease outbreaks (Young, et al, 2013); probabilistic reasoning and the difficulty of delimiting the precautionary principle in the pharmaceutical industry (Osimani, 2013); and variations in understandings of probabilistic information received during pregnancy screening for chromosomal anomalies such as Down's syndrome (Burton-Jeangros, Cavalli, Gouilhers and Hammer, 2013). The papers illustrate the many and varied difficulties and paradoxes inherent in the quintessential step in risk-thinking of building expectations about the future from probability quantifications.…”

Probabilistic thinking and health risks: An editorial

“…The final research paper (Young et al, 2013) is concerned with the impact of media coverage on public perceptions of health risks. The authors confirm the findings of other studies that comparable conditions which receive greater media attention are assessed as more serious, more representative of disease, and also, perhaps surprisingly, less probable than those which are given less coverage.…”