Probabilistic thinking and health risks: An editorial

Heyman, Bob; Alaszewski, Andy; Brown, Patrick

doi:10.1080/13698575.2013.756262

Cited by 13 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…This comment suggests that a patient might have no knowledge at all if not provided with implicitly objective medical information, evoking Charles, Gafni and Whelan's (1999) warning against considering the patient as 'an empty glass [to be] filled up with new knowledge' in the context of shared decision-making. The reference to 'mere guesses' highlights the low status Elwyn and Miron-Shatz (2010) accord to irrational (or in Zinn's terms, intuitive or in-between) decisions; this judgement is critiqued by Heyman, Alaszewski, and Brown (2013), illustrating Zinn's (2009) account of a move amongst sociologists to reject the narrow focus on rational choice which he says remains dominant in the biomedical community.…”

Section: Risk and Preventionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Current conditions or future risks: certainty and uncertainty in decisions about statins

Polak

2016

Health, Risk & Society

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Preventive medications such as statins are recommended to an increasingly large number of people. To those who make these recommendations, prevention is synonymous with risk reduction; the clinical task of helping people decide about preventive medication is therefore widely framed as one of risk communication. In this article, I explore the role of risk and uncertainty in accounts of medication decisions, drawing on qualitative data from interviews carried out between 2011 and 2013 in the east of England with people who had been offered statins. I found that very few participants mentioned risk or likelihood, or described weighing benefits against harms, the process central to the risk communication project. Instead, those who had decided to take statins described their certainty that statins were needed to treat current problems. This certainty was informed by knowledge about the present or the past; information about possible future harms was presented solely as contributing to concern about current problems. In contrast, those who had decided not to take statins explained their decisions in terms of the inherent uncertainty of information about the future, presenting this uncertainty as a reason to decline medication. This asymmetry between explanations for accepting and for declining statins is rooted in differences between the ways past, present and future information are handled. These findings challenge the assumption that decisions about statins are construed as decisions about risk by those offered them, and raise questions about the usefulness of using risk and uncertainty as key concepts for theoretical accounts of what is going on when people consider taking preventive medication.

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Section: Risk and Preventionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Current conditions or future risks: certainty and uncertainty in decisions about statins

Polak

2016

Health, Risk & Society

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“…When subjected to further scrutiny, however, we see that ‘risks’ involve countless assumptions which must be taken‐for‐granted in order for risk assessment to function (Heyman et al . ). The general acceptance of particular outcomes as adverse – as defined by some (powerful) groups, and not others – through the influence of scientific and other systems of knowledge, indicates that risks are never merely neutral and technical, but profoundly political, moral and value‐laden (Douglas , Møller and Harrits , Szmukler ).…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Furthermore, probabilistic attributions linking particular adverse outcomes to decisions or behaviours involve the grouping of these outcomes within one relatively homogenous ‘category’, overlooking the variations within (Heyman et al . ). While the probabilistic aspects of working with risk receive the most attention within the medical‐science literature, the values, categories and time‐frames intrinsic to risk remain much more implicit and insidious (Heyman et al .…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 97%

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The everyday risk work of Dutch child‐healthcare professionals: inferring ‘safe’ and ‘good’ parenting through trust, as mediated by a lens of gender and class

Veltkamp

Brown

2017

Sociology Health & Illness

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Amidst intensifying policy concerns with children's wellbeing and development, healthcare professionals are required not only to assess risk of abuse and neglect, but to manage risk of 'poor parenting' more broadly. Drawing on 15 in-depth interviews and non-participant observations of 61 professional-family interactions, across four preventative public health services for children in the Netherlands, we explored how professionals accomplished such risk work amid intractable uncertainties. Building inferences from brief encounters with families, professionals gauged the extent to which they trusted parents to care 'appropriately'. This trust developed most readily with parents experienced as 'familiar' by the largely middle-class female professionals. Harnessing Schutzian phenomenology, we analyse the related manifestations of social structure within the interactionaldynamics and lifeworlds of risk assessment. We argue that social structures of gender, class and ethnicity can be seen as influential both through the differing potential for 'we-relationships' to be formed and via the generalising and stereotyped knowledge applied in their absence.

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“…One fundamental yet often implicit feature of risk is the attachment of value to an entity or outcome that could be lost in the future (Heyman, Alaszewski, & Brown, 2013). It is partly through the subtle valuing and imposition of particular futures -the prioritising of certain actors' values at the expense of others -that risk becomes a political tool (Douglas, 1992).…”

Section: Risk and Legitimacymentioning

confidence: 99%

Risk and Social Theory: the legitimacy of risks and risk as a tool of legitimation

Brown

2014

Health, Risk & Society

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EDITORIALRisk and Social Theory: the legitimacy of risks and risk as a tool of legitimation In this editorial, I introduce the first in a new series of special issues on social theoretical perspectives towards risk and uncertainty. These will appear annually, with each issue addressing a specific theoretical or conceptual theme, or problem, pertaining to social scientific studies of risk and uncertainty. The articles included in this first collection are intended to demonstrate variation in the field of social theories of risk and uncertainty, though each of the articles speaks in different ways to concerns regarding the legitimacy of risks and/or policies oriented to risk. This editorial introduces the four contributions in the special issue, while also considering some broader dimensions of legitimacy as a means of locating some cross-cutting themes that connect the articles and their respective theoretical orientations. I outline a framework by which different configurations of risk, authority and consensus are considered in their generation of legitimacy, or in the lack thereof. Risks can form the basis of effective governance by existing authorities in line with general consensus (authority + consensus = legitimate risk), notions of risk can be harnessed by existing authorities to foster consensus (authority + risk = legitimate consensus), invoking notions of risk in line with popular consensus can bolster authority (consensus + risk = legitimate authority), but 'risks' with neither consensus nor links to authority fail to become legitimate. These primary understandings are developed and nuanced further by the four articles, in an array of theoretical directions. The editorial closes by looking towards the Risk and Social Theory special issue for 2015, which will focus on theories of risk and uncertainty in non-Western contexts.

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Probabilistic thinking and health risks: An editorial

Cited by 13 publications

References 31 publications

Current conditions or future risks: certainty and uncertainty in decisions about statins

Current conditions or future risks: certainty and uncertainty in decisions about statins

The everyday risk work of Dutch child‐healthcare professionals: inferring ‘safe’ and ‘good’ parenting through trust, as mediated by a lens of gender and class

Risk and Social Theory: the legitimacy of risks and risk as a tool of legitimation

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