Abstracts (PDF file, 1.8MB) - Society for Risk Analysis

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SRA 2013 Annual Meeting Abstracts P.96 Lu, H; Marquette University; hunter8828@gmail.com Burgers or tofu? Eating between two worlds: Risk information seeking and processing during dietary acculturation As the fastest growing ethnic student group in the United States, Chinese international students are becoming a prominent part of the society. Studies have shown that with acculturation, Chinese international students have consumed a more Americanized diet (increased fat and cholesterol and less fiber than their traditional diet) and that this acculturated diet has been associated with a higher prevalence of chronic diseases. The understanding of what factors, cognitive, affective, and/or socio-demographic, might motivate Chinese international students to seek and process risk information about potential health risks from adopting a more Americanized diet is the primary focus of the current study. Guided by the Risk Information Seeking and Processing (RISP) model, an online 2 (severity: high vs. low) x 2 (coping strategies: present vs. absent) between-subjects experiment was conducted among 635 participants. Data were analyzed primarily using structural equation modeling. Some highlights of this study include the situational roles that informational subjective norms (ISN) and affective responses play in risk information seeking and processing. More specifically, ISN had direct relationships with systematic processing and heuristic processing while working through information insufficiency to affect information seeking and information avoidance. Negative affect was positively related to information seeking but also worked through information insufficiency to pose an impact on information seeking. Positive affect was positively related to information avoidance and heuristic processing. Future implications include boosting perceived social pressure and using appropriate fear appeals in healthy eating education programs, and creating more awareness about potential risks of tasty, convenient, inexpensive but unhealthy food. The author would like to be considered for the Student Travel Award. W2-B.2 Luben, TJ*; Milhan, G; Autrup, H; Baxter, L; Blair, A; Kromhout, H; Ritter, L; Stayner, L; Symanski, E; Wright, JM; U.S. EPA; luben.tom@epa.gov Evaluating uncertainty due to exposure assessment in epidemiologic studies used in risk assessment The results of epidemiologic studies make important contributions to risk assessment because they provide direct information on disease risks in humans and at relevant exposure levels. The ability to characterize and quantify the uncertainty associated with assessment of exposure in environmental and occupational epidemiologic studies is essential to fully utilize epidemiologic data for risk assessment and decision-making processes. A multidisciplinary team of experts was assembled to identify sources of uncertainty and to propose approaches for reducing uncertainty related to exposure assessment in epidemiologic studies. Recommendations that would help to move the state of the science forward and further enhance the use of results from epidemiologic studies in quantitative risk assessments included: (1) Use of an interdisciplinary team to develop an optimized exposure assessment approach with quantitative exposure-response information for every epidemiologic study in order to inform risk assessments; (2) Quantify exposure measurement error and examine the actual impact of this uncertainty on health effect estimates from epidemiologic studies; (3) Encourage the development and application of techniques to quantify and adjust for exposure measurement error in epidemiologic studies; and (4) Develop improved methods for assessing exposure to individual substances from multiple routes of exposures and for dealing with multiple environmental pollutants (including mixtures) which is common to all observational epidemiologic studies. Finally, the group recommends that a new generation of cross-disciplinary scientists be trained to create optimized exposure assessment methods for epidemiologic studies that include quantifying and reducing the uncertainty in the quantitative risk assessment process attributable to exposure assessment limitations. Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the US EPA. T1-H.1 Lundberg, RP*; Willis, HH; Pardee RAND Graduate School; russell.lundberg@gmail.com Priotitizing homeland security using a deliberative method for ranking risks Managing homeland security risks involves balancing concerns about numerous types of accidents, disasters, and terrorist attacks. These risks can vary greatly in kind and consequence; how people perceive them influences the choices they make about activities to pursue, opportunities to take, and situations to avoid. Reliably capturing these choices is a challenging example of comparative risk assessment. The National Academy of Sciences review of Department of Homeland Security risk analysis identifies developing methods of comparative risk assessment as an analytic priority for homeland security planning and analysis. The Deliberative Method for Ranking Risks incorporates recommendations from the risk perception literature into both the description of the risks and the process of eliciting preferences from individuals and groups. It has been empirically validated with citizens, risk managers, and policy makers in the context of managing risks to health, safety, and the environment. However, these methods have not as of yet been used in addressing the challenge of managing natural disaster and terrorism hazards. Steps in this method include first conceptualizing the risk, including both how to differentiate risks and the characteristics to needed describe them in a comprehensive manner, then developing concise summaries of existing knowledge of how the hazards. Using these materials, relative concerns are elicited about the hazards in a deliberative process. These relative concerns about hazards provide a starting point for prioritizing solutions for reducing risks to homeland security. We identify individuals' relative concerns about homeland security hazards and the characteristics which influence those concerns. The consistency and agreement of the rankings, as well as the individual satisfaction with the process and results, suggest that the deliberative method for ranking risks can be appropriately applied in the homeland security domain. T3-B.2 MacDonell, M*; Garrahan, K; Hertzberg, R; Argonne National Laboratory (author 1), U.S. EPA (author 2), Emory University (author 3); macdonell@anl.gov Stakeholder Involvement and Risk Communication in CRA Planning, Scoping and Problem Formulation Cumulative risk analysis has long been rooted in stakeholder involvement and risk communication. The cumulative risk concept is central to the national environmental policy established more than forty years ago, and assessment approaches and tools have continued to evolve since that time. Recent advances in information and communication technologies have greatly increased community awareness of risk issues and also greatly simplified community involvement in the process of assessing those issues. One key aspect of problem formulation and goal setting for a cumulative risk analysis is deciding what metrics are well suited to the given assessment, or which units of risk to use. Considering the wide array of stakeholders, stressors, exposures, temporal and spatial scales, sensitivities, and priorities commonly at play, collective inputs to the core metrics can help maintain a focus on practical decision needs. Among the measures being used is disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), e.g., the number of years of healthy life lost because of the given problem (such as chemical and microbial pollution). Questions include how many DALYs would be unacceptable for a large city? For an individual? Jointly developing these risk measures can anchor the assessment process, recognizing that planning, scoping, and framing the problem are iterative activities and the original metrics will likely change as the assessments progress. Cloud computing, mobile apps, and gamefying approaches are among the technologies and techniques being tapped to enhance stakeholder involvement in articulating risk problems and scoping assessments, as well as collecting and sharing data and communicating risk estimates to guide effective responses. This paper will highlight examples of stakeholder involvement and risk communication for different types of cumulative risk assessments. December 8-11, 2013 - Baltimore, MD
SRA 2013 Annual Meeting Abstracts W3-I.1 MacGillivray, BH; Cardiff University; macgillivraybh@cardiff.ac.uk Heuristics in policy relevant science: an analytical framework for characterising the strengths and limits of formal risk and decision analysis Scholars long argued that one of the defining features of science was that it is systematic and methodical. That is, science was conceived as being governed by generally agreed upon rules for designing experiments, analysing data, and discriminating between conflicting hypotheses. Yet today this is a rather unfashionable view amongst historians and philosophers, with rules now seen as a somewhat peripheral feature of scientific practice. However, focussing on formal risk and decision analysis, this paper argues that the obituary of rules has been prematurely written. It develops an analytical framework for studying a particular class of rules: heuristics. Risk research tends to view heuristics as lay reasoning devices that are generally sub-optimal. In contrast, we follow Pólya and Pearl in defining heuristics as rules of search, classification, inference, and choice that fall short of formal demonstration, yet that are indispensible for domains that did not admit of formal logic or proofs. Analysing various domains of environmental and public health governance, we identify structurally similar rules of thumb used to screen potential risk objects, to discriminate between signal and noise, to weight evidence, to select models, to extrapolate beyond datasets, and to make decisions based on agreed upon facts. We analyse the origins of these heuristics, their justifications, the functions that they play, their empirical adequacy, and the biases that they introduce. Our basic claim is that heuristics play a central role in how we collect, interpret, and act upon scientific knowledge in governing risk; that this role is not necessarily problematic; and that, above all, it needs to be taken seriously if we are concerned with robust, evidence-based public policy. T3-I.4 MacKenzie, CA; Naval Postgraduate School; camacken@nps.edu Deploying Simulation to Compare Among Different Risk Reduction Strategies for Supply Chains A firm can choose among several strategies to reduce the risk of disruptions in its supply chain, including holding inventory, buying from multiple suppliers, and helping suppliers recover. Because these risk management strategies may be non-continuous and depend on each other, simulation can be used to select a near optimal combination of strategies. We develop a conceptual framework for a firm who wishes to select resilience strategies that maximize its profit. Because the risk management strategies may be dependent upon each other, finding the optimal mix of strategies becomes a difficult combinatorial problem. For example, holding inventory may maximize the profit of all the strategies examined in isolation, but a combination of helping the supplier recover and buying from an alternate supplier may result in a higher profit than just holding inventory. Simulating multiple strategies together can account for these interdependencies among the risk management strategies. This increases the number of scenarios the simulation will explore, which increases simulation time. The trade-off between increasing the number of simulations to assess the profit for a given scenario and exploring more scenarios is similar to the trade-off that occurs when using simulation to solve stochastic optimization problems. P.139 Madden, M*; Young, B; Datko-Williams, L; Wilkie, A; Dubois, JJ; Stanek, LW; Johns, D; Owens, EO; ORISE, U.S. EPA-ORD, U.S. CDC-NIOSH; madden.meagan@epa.gov Review of Health Effects and Toxicological Interactions of Air Pollutant Mixtures Containing Oxides of Nitrogen The U.S. EPA sets National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) to protect against health effects from criteria air pollutants with the recognition that human populations are exposed to complex air pollutant mixtures. Exposure to these mixtures may differentially affect human health relative to single pollutants as a result of biological interactions between constituents of the mixture. If the effects of a mixture are equal to the sum of the effects of individual components, the effects are additive and the interaction effect is zero; additivity is often assumed as the null hypothesis for interaction effects. Alternatively, synergism (effects greater than additive) and antagonism (effects less than additive) are possible interactions, although the definitions and usage of these terms are not consistent across studies. To understand the potential biological interactions of exposure to air pollutant mixtures, we reviewed toxicological evidence (animal and controlled human exposure) from mixture studies cited in EPA’s Integrated Science Assessments (ISAs) and Air Quality Criteria Documents (AQCDs). We used quantitative and qualitative methods to determine the effects of pollutant mixtures on all health-related endpoints evaluated in these studies, specifically focusing on mixtures containing oxides of nitrogen. Many studies could not be analyzed quantitatively using our statistical model due to incomplete reporting of data. Instead, studies with incomplete response data were evaluated qualitatively for evidence of interaction effects and relevant vocabulary such as “additivity,” “synergism,” and “antagonism.” Although a number of studies reported deviations from additivity, there was no discernible pattern to the relationship between similar exposure scenarios and the direction or magnitude of the biological response. The views expressed in this abstract are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of the U.S. EPA. P.57 Maeda, Y*; Marui, R; Yamauchi, H; Yamaki, N; Shizuoka University; tymaeda1@ipc.shizuoka.ac.jp Comparative study of risk with nursing work in Japan and China Risk with nursing work, particularly medical incidents, in hospitals in China and Japan was compared. Data about medical incidents in Japan were obtained from the survey of 1,275 Japanese hospitals operated by Japan Council for Quality Health Care in 2011. As for China, a questionnaire survey was conducted from December 2012 to January 2013 among 631 nurses in Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital. As a result, situations related to medical incidents, factors of medical incidents, length of service of nurses who found the incidents, and the season when the incidents occurred frequently were common in Japan and China, whereas frequency of medical incidents were different. In addition, satisfaction with work schedule of nursing was investigated by several questions in the survey in China. Satisfaction level with the schedule was very high in average, however dissatisfaction was also found for some questions. Independence of medical incident reporting and satisfaction with scheduling was tested. In some questions, significant relationship between dissatisfaction with schedule and frequency of medical incidents were obtained. It suggests that medical incidents are related to busyness of nursing work. December 8-11, 2013 - Baltimore, MD
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