Parents’ Perceptions of Children’s Accident Risk

The purpose of the present thesis was, first, to study how parents and other adults percieve or judge children’s accident risk, and, secondly, to relate such judgem ents to the subjects’ preferences for and satisfaction with different residential conditions. A theoretical framework is proposed which assumes that judgem ents o f children’s accident risk are based on beliefs about what causes accidents to children. Such beliefs are furthermore assumed to be acquired more often from indirect sources than from own direct experiences. N evertheless, because of parents’ higher motivation to protect their children, they are assumed to differ from other adults who are not parents with respect to their causal models and, as a consequence, their risk perceptions. To test som e implications o f the theoretical framework, three empirical studies were carried out in which parents and nonparents were requested to judge the risk children run o f having accidents under different circumstances and to judge the strengths o f five causes o f such accidents, the parent, the child, the environment, other people, and chance. In two o f the studies the subjects were also requested to express their preferences for different residential neighborhoods varying in traffic conditions, or satisfaction with their own residential conditions either as it is or if changed in different ways. Support for the implications o f the theoretical framework was obtained in that causal explanations of accidents were shown to play a decisive role for judgem ents of accident risk. However, very slight differences were found between parents’ and nonparents’ causal models and risk perceptions. The results furthermore indicated that accident risk was o f importance for parents’ satisfaction with their residential conditions if changes with perceived accident consequences were implemented. In this respect parents differed from nonparents. For the latter other things than children’s accident risk tended to be more important.