Journal article
Eliciting Risk Perceptions: Does Conditional Question Wording Have a Downside?
Medical decision making, Vol.44(2), pp.141-151
02/2024
DOI: 10.1177/0272989X231223491
PMID: 38235561
Abstract
To assess the impact of risk perceptions on prevention efforts or behavior change, best practices involve conditional risk measures, which ask people to estimate their risk contingent on a course of action (e.g., "if not vaccinated").
To determine whether the use of conditional wording-and its drawing of attention to one specific contingency-has an important downside that could lead researchers to overestimate the true relationship between perceptions of risk and intended prevention behavior.
In an online experiment, US participants from Amazon's MTurk (
= 750) were presented with information about an unfamiliar fungal disease and then randomly assigned among 3 conditions. In all conditions, participants were asked to estimate their risk for the disease (i.e., subjective likelihood) and to decide whether they would get vaccinated. In 2 conditional-wording conditions (1 of which involved a delayed decision), participants were asked about their risk if they did not get vaccinated. For an unconditional/benchmark condition, this conditional was not explicitly stated but was still formally applicable because participants had not yet been informed that a vaccine was even available for this disease.
When people gave risk estimates to a conditionally worded risk question after making a decision, the observed relationship between perceived risk and prevention decisions was inflated (relative to in the unconditional/benchmark condition).
The use of conditionals in risk questions can lead to overestimates of the impact of perceived risk on prevention decisions but not necessarily to a degree that should call for their omission.
Conditional wording, which is commonly recommended for eliciting risk perceptions, has a potential downside.It can produce overestimates of the true relationship between perceived risk and prevention behavior, as established in the current work.Though concerning, the biasing effect of conditional wording was small-relative to the measurement benefits that conditioning usually provides-and should not deter researchers from conditioning risk perceptions.More research is needed to determine when the biasing impact of conditional wording is strongest.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Eliciting Risk Perceptions: Does Conditional Question Wording Have a Downside?
- Creators
- Jeremy D Strueder - Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USAJane E Miller - Vanderbilt UniversityXianshen Yu - New York UniversityPaul D Windschitl - University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Medical decision making, Vol.44(2), pp.141-151
- DOI
- 10.1177/0272989X231223491
- PMID
- 38235561
- eISSN
- 1552-681X
- Grant note
- DOI: 10.13039/100000001, name: National Science Foundation, award: Grant SES-1851738
- Language
- English
- Electronic publication date
- 01/18/2024
- Date published
- 02/2024
- Academic Unit
- Psychological and Brain Sciences
- Record Identifier
- 9984548288902771
Metrics
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