| Description |
Agenda | Participants & Presentations
Spatial Analysis of Health Risk Perception
Upham Hotel, Santa Barbara, CA
October 10-11, 2003
Organizers
Barbara Herr Harthorn (Institute for Social, Behavioral,
and Economic Research), Laury Oaks (Women's Studies), and
Susan Stonich (Anthropology and Environmental Studies)
Purpose
This specialist research meeting will convene an interdisciplinary
group of about 15 behavioral science and health researchers
whose work has centered on the areas of social risk theory,
cultural constructions of health and risk, and spatial analysis
of health. The purpose of the meeting will be to explore common
grounds for new interdisciplinary research proposals that
bring together spatial analysis with work looking at perception
of health risk. People's perceptions of health risks are much
more consistently associated with their behavior than are
the epidemiological distribution of risk factors in populations
or experts' judgments and communications about risk and risk
factors. Judgments about risk acceptability have also assumed
a central position in the current global geopolitical environment
(e.g., in relation to food safety, location of infrastructure
systems, migration and immigration, infectious diseases, and
worker safety, to name only a few). Spatial analysis of health
risk perception offers the possibility of helping to resolve
paradoxical aspects of the social amplification of risk as
well as processes of optimistic bias associated with risky
behaviors, yet it is a largely unexplored arena. The format
of this Research Specialist Meeting will be a 2-day meeting
that alternates formal presentations with extensive discussion.
Possible outcomes include networking that may lead to new
collaborative research proposals to the NSF (e.g., under the
new Spatial Social Science initiative) and the NIH (where
the poor response of the lay public to conventional risk communication
continues to be one of the most serious problems), a larger,
international research conference and resultant publication(s),
and dissemination of spatial analysis tools through CSISS.
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