The everyday experience of living with risk and uncertainty

Abstract

This editorial provides an overview of the articles included in the Special Issue of Health, Risk & Society on living with risk and uncertainty. The papers were originally given at the 2006 BSA Risk and Society Study group and the authors were invited to revise them from this Special Issue. In this Editorial, we identify several important themes within the papers. While it has become a commonplace that modern society is a ‘risk society,’ in which individuals have become responsible for managing an increasing range of potentially life threatening risks, it is not clear how and in what circumstances individuals frame their situation in terms of risk. Henwood and colleagues draw on evidence from three interrelated studies which form part of the Economic and Social Research Council funded network on the Social Contexts and Responses to Risk (SCARR). These authors concluded that ‘risk’ is not ubiquitous within respondents' accounts but is rather one frame amongst many that can be used. The articles in the Special Issue indicate that a situation is framed as a risk if individuals are aware of the presence of danger which if not correctly or skilfully managed could result in harm, even death. Harries' article on flood risk emphasises the shock and trauma of being flooded and relates how some flood victims experience long term insecurity and anxiety. Gjernes' account of Sami reindeer herders describes the ways in which a combination of external forces threaten the continued existence of Sami culture and their social relations, and Tulloch documents the impact of being directly affected by a bomb attack as well as his resistance to the media accounts and construction of risks. As Zinn indicates, when individuals frame a situation in terms of risk, it does not follow that they will rely upon experts with their cognitive rational approaches to risk management, and they may instead use approaches which are neither rational nor irrational but have elements of both, such as trust. Indeed, in this issue, only Tulloch describes using experts to manage the personal consequences of his post-bomb trauma. There is generally more evidence in these papers of resistance to expert definitions of risk and to expert prescriptions for managing it, whether this is the explicit resistance which Lee describes amongst her bottle-feeding mothers or the transformation of public health messages to fit with lay beliefs which Gjernes describes amongst women reindeer herders in Northern Norway. As Zinn notes, individuals use a variety of approaches to managing risk including those which are apparently irrational such as the denial described by Harries or the ‘enduring’ described by Honkasalo in her study of women in Northern Karelia in their response to the perceived certainty of a negative outcome; in this case, death from heart disease.

Keywords:

• risk
• uncertainty
• framing
• lived experience
• everyday life

Introduction

The papers in this Special Issue originated in the 2006 British Sociological Association Risk and Society Group conference at the University of Kent which we organised and which was sponsored by Health, Risk & Society. While the papers given at the conference covered a wide range of topics in different domains of risk, when we reviewed them we felt that one theme stood out, and that this was the personal experience of risk and uncertainty which was central to many of the keynote speeches as well as to the research presented at the conference. We have therefore invited the speakers who addressed these issues to write up their papers with a view to publication in a Special Issue. We would like to thank all the contributors to this issue for the time and effort they have taken to convert conference papers into journal articles, and also the reviewers who have dedicated much time to ensuring that the particular standards of anonymous peer review were applied to these Special Issue articles. In this Editorial, we reflect on some of the key issues raised within this collection of articles.

Is everything risk? Issues of risk framing

It has become a commonplace of recent sociological theorising that contemporary society is a ‘risk society’ in which individuals have become responsible for managing an increasing range of risks, many of which can only be identified by specialist expertise, are generated by global processes and have the capacity to destroy both individuals and communities. As Giddens notes in his analysis of the consequence of modernity:

The baseline for analysis has to be the inevitability of living with dangers which are remote from the control not only of individuals, but also large organisations, including states; and which are of high intensity and life-threatening for millions of human beings and potentially the for the whole of humanity (1990, p. 131).

Giddens (1990) argues that with the secularisation of society and the decline of ‘irrational’ explanations of events such as the will of God or fate, rational risk-based logic plays a central role in modern society in managing the future and explaining the past (Alaszewski and Burgess 2007). Individuals in modern society are responsible for identifying, managing and increasing awareness of a range of dangers, many of which require specialist technology to measure the extent and implications of risk involved. For Beck, modern society is risk society (1992), in which individuals are walking along the edge of a precipice and one false step will result in disaster and serious harm. In this worldview, nuclear power is the archetypal modern risk: invisible, created by science and capable of disasters with global consequences. In an attack on proposals to construct new nuclear power stations as a response to global warming, Beck equates nuclear power with danger and argues that:

the actors who are supposed to be the guarantors of security and rationality—the state, science, and industry—are engaged in a highly ambivalent game. They are no longer trustees but suspects, no longer managers of risks but also sources of risks. For they are urging the population to climb into an aircraft for which a landing strip has not yet been built (Beck 2008, p. 31).

For Beck, living in modern society means the anticipation of catastrophe everywhere (2008, p. 31). The stresses of living in a society surrounded by risks and taking increased responsibility for such risks can be seen as the source of anxiety and of the paradox of timid prosperity which Taylor-Gooby described in the following way:

Material levels of security in the western world are higher than ever before … However, the sources of uncertainty and the mechanisms available to most people to deal with them have changed, leading to the paradox of timid prosperity—growing uncertainty amid rising affluence (Taylor-Gooby 2000, p. 3).

Similarly, Furedi (2002) argues that this subjective sense of insecurity, i.e. fear of poverty, illness and destitution, creates a risk averse society in which culture of fear ultimately undermines individual development and scientific progress.

This sociological theorising is based on a limited empirical base, and the articles in this issue explore the theoretical and methodological issue drawing strongly on empirical evidence. In particular, they examine how individuals live with dangers and the meaning and use they make of concepts such as risk. Henwood and colleagues (2008) deal with the issue of how risk may be framed by researchers in field research. They argue that there is the danger that if researchers assume that individuals living in contemporary society see their world in terms of risk, they will frame their research in these terms and will therefore find evidence supporting their initial assumptions. To avoid such circularity, they argue for qualitative methodologies designed to identify the ways in which individuals frame issues in different context. Their article discusses the tension between needing to use terms such as ‘risk’ which may in themselves set an agenda, and the attendant difficulty of failing to gather informative data if the discussion is not guided towards themes of risk and risk management. They conclude that researchers must be skilful in identifying competing frames within their data.

Henwood and colleagues draw on evidence from three interrelated studies which form part of the Economic and Social Research Council funded network on the Social Contexts and Responses to Risk (SCARR). The studies explore the relevance of risk in three spheres of life and for three groups of people; individuals who live near a nuclear power station, individuals who are engaged in and make decision about their careers, work and the labour market, and individuals involved in different aspects of intimate relationships. There was a clear difference between these groups in the ways in which they framed issues. Amongst the group living near the nuclear power station there was evidence that some participants in the research used risk to frame issues either in terms of the personal risk of illness or the collective risk of a major accident. By way of contrast, participants in the study of intimate relations discussed their decisions and choices in terms of having and taking the opportunities for romantic love. They did not accept that risk with its overtones of calculative rationality was relevant for or appropriate as a way of thinking about their own intimate relationships. The participants in the study of work also did not frame their decisions and choices in terms of risk, however amongst this groups participants were willing to accept that risk was one possible way of thinking about choices. The conclusions drawn within this paper suggest that ‘risk’ is not ubiquitous within respondents' accounts but is rather one frame amongst many that can be used, but this raises other issues such as when is risk invoked as an explanatory framework, by whom it is invoked and why.

Using the risk framework

An important aspect of use or invocation of risk is the awareness of danger, and disaster can be seen as clear evidence of danger. In discussions of nuclear power, reference to disasters such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island indicate the use of a risk frame. While such disasters relate to perceived high levels of harm to either individuals or society, the level of harm or ‘body count’ does not in itself account for an event being defined as a disaster. For example, as Zinn (2008) notes in his paper, one reaction of the American public to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre was to reduce air travel and instead travel long distances by car. Since car travelling is actually more dangerous than air travel, the increased mortality due to road deaths has now exceeded that of the initial attack (Gigerenzer 2006). While the attack on the Centre was clearly a national disaster as evidenced by media coverage, public inquiry and political response, the increase in road fatalities has attracted minimal attention. As Douglas notes, while the body count is important, a disaster must also threaten the established order, i.e. ‘the invisible fences and paths by which the community coordinates its life in common’ (1990, p. 7). Goffman (1975, p. 4) refers to Schutz's analysis of framing, arguing that when individuals shift from one frame or form of reality to another they experience it as a shock, and disasters tend to be seen as threatening or ‘shocking’ events. In the introduction to the report on the 9/11 investigations, Whitney of the New York Times stated that:

That crystal blue morning changed the world, shocking the United States into realizing that it had been drawn into a global war with brutal suddenness (2004, p. 7).

The shock of events and the extent to which they threaten individual and collective security is evident in most of the papers in this Special Issue. Harries' article (2008) on flood risk emphasises the shock and trauma of being flooded and the ways in which some flood victims experience long-term insecurity and anxiety. Gjernes' (2008) account of Sami reindeer herders describes how a combination of external threats, including global warming and Norwegian government policy to reduce the number of reindeer, threaten the continued existence of Sami culture and their social relations. Tulloch's (2008) article meticulously documents the impact of being directly involved in a bomb attack. He describes in detail how his everyday life was torn apart by a bomb in a tube train in London in the 7/7 attack, and how his own cultural representation as a ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’ emerged alongside his access to risk case management expertise during the ensuing months.

The ambiguity of risk is evident in Tulloch's highly personal account of his experience of a terrorist bomb attack in London and its aftermath. In his personal narrative, Tulloch acknowledges the traumatic effects of being involved in the attack. In one aspect of his narrative, the trauma of the bomb attack became a continuation and amplification of an earlier traumatic event and together both events undermined his physical and psychological well-being, exposing him to additional dangers, for example his knee-jerk reactions to contact in public spaces nearly resulted in serious accidents. Tulloch discusses how he engaged with this personal dimension of risk though case management, i.e. using face to face assessment and management of ‘at risk’ or vulnerable people, for example the victims of trauma. However, he is also aware of the ways in which his construction of a narrative enabled him to present himself as an active rational agent rather than the passive victim of events.

As Tulloch notes, such risk framing in relation to personal biography can also be identified amongst individuals who have experienced health traumas such as strokes (see for example Alaszewski 2006) but in his case the threat and response was not just individual but also involved a societal dimension. The events of 7 July 2005 became central to media and political debates about the global threat of Islamic terrorists and the ways in which Britain should protect itself against this risk. Thus, in this media debate the moral underpinning of risk and its relationship to more traditional concepts such as sin (Douglas 1990) was evident through categorisation of the bombers as evil Islamic terrorists.

This moral dimension of risk can also be evident at individual level. In Lee's (2008) account of mothers who decide to bottle-feed their children, the framing of issues as risk arises more from moral accounting than from the shock and trauma of a specific event. While Tulloch notes the ways in which he could use his risk narrative to present himself as a competent and responsible person, it is clear that in the face of expert advice that breast milk is safe and therefore best for babies, mothers who decide that they want to bottle feed their babies need to account for their decision and need to justify themselves as good mothers.

In wider terms, the concept of framing draws on Goffman's study of Frame Analysis. Goffman argues that if individuals are to be able to act in any particular situation they must decide what is happening and this framing shapes their response to the situation. He describes this in the following way:

I assume that when individuals attend to any current situation, they face the question: ‘What is it that's going on here?’ Whether asked explicitly, as in times of confusion or doubt, or tacitly, during occasions of usual certitude, the question is put and the answer to it is presumed by the way in which the individuals then proceed to get on with affairs at hand (Goffman 1975, p. 8).

A situation is framed as a risk if individuals are aware of the presence of danger which if not correctly or skilfully managed will probably result in harm even death. Amongst the Sami reindeer herders, this sense of danger is explicit in accounts of everyday life and in accounts of choices and decisions about food. If risk framing is implicit then one would expect actions that seek to identify and neutralise hazards. Overall, there is less evidence of this in these papers perhaps because most of them are based on interviews which generate narrative accounts of situations rather than observational studies which would focus more on actions. However, part of the aim of Harries' (2008) study of flood risk was to understand why it might be that people fail to protect themselves against floods, even when offered warnings, advice and materials such as sandbags to protect their homes. Through his analysis of qualitative interviews, Harries argues that the need for a sense of what Giddens (1990) terms ‘ontological security,’ the feeling of being safe and secure in their own chosen environment, was stronger than the need for protection against a real but still apparently ‘distant’ flooding risk. In their interviews, individuals used various devices to deny they were in danger. Thus rather than looking over the precipice of danger they preferred to focus on the comforts of home. It is possible to see such a response in terms of false optimism, i.e. a psychological tendency for individuals to assess their vulnerability to risk as lower than the population average but as Sutton (1999) points out it is difficult to gather evidence of false optimism, even where the epidemiological evidence is clear-cut as in the case of smoking. Harries considers these accounts in relation to Maslow's (1943) hierarchy of need, and suggests that the immediate need to feel safe demands an avoidance of actions to prevent flooding, as to engage in such actions would mean accepting that the home is not a safe and secure place. In this example, the immediacy of the threat to wellbeing is a more powerful motivator than the hypothetical physical risk of future flooding.

Using risk to manage everyday life

Paradoxically then, one response to risk is actually to do nothing about it. This passive or fatalistic approach has been linked to the overwhelming experience of some types of risk and uncertainties, for example those experienced by migrant sex workers (Wallman 2001) or individuals with serious mental health problems (Ryan 2000). Several articles in this Special Issue draw attention to the use of such approaches. They do not see them as default strategies which are used because individuals see no choice, but as effective ways of dealing with certain specific circumstances and issues. Thus Zinn notes that ‘hope’ is often classified as an ‘irrational’ response to risk and uncertainty but he points out that in situations with high levels of danger and little certainty of a positive outcome, hope can provide a reason for continued action. Similarly Honkasalo (2008) in her study of women in Northern Karelia sees endurance is a reasoned and reasonable response to the perceived certainty of a negative outcome; death from heart disease.

There is also some intriguing evidence of alternative risk framing within these papers. Some respondents in the nuclear project described by Henwood et al. (2008) described the ‘stigma’ of living near a nuclear power station as delivering some hidden benefits to the community, for example the avoidance of increased development and consequently better access to local amenities, whilst recognising the potential harm to the area that the power station might also bring. There is some similarity here with Harries' respondents, needing to feel the sense of ontological security in their chosen environment.

Zinn suggests in his paper that the ‘expert’ approach is based on cognitive rationality based on scientifically identifying cause and effect. This involves converting immeasurable uncertainties into defined measurable and therefore manageable risks. Tulloch in his paper notes how epidemiology can be used to collect evidence about morbidity and mortality and then this evidence can be used as the basis of protective action through public health measures or through various forms of insurance. It is interesting to note that in this collection of papers there is little evidence for the use of calculative methods and cognitive rationality to manage risk. Perhaps the only exception is Tulloch's account of the ways in which he sought to rebuild his life after his trauma and especially his engagement with case management. Case management is an expert-based system designed to assess and manage risk for individuals on behalf of a care provider. It uses a variety of expert techniques to identify and address the causes of dangerous behaviour, in Tulloch's case his overreaction to specific threats.

There is in these papers further evidence of the strategy which Zinn sees as neither fully rational nor irrational and refers to as ‘in-between.’ Gjernes notes that Sami reindeer herders see themselves and their way of life under threat. She notes that they are aware of public health knowledge about health which is grounded in epidemiological evidence. Thus, they are aware of the health risk of smoking, not taking regular exercise and not eating vegetables and fruit. However, they filtered this advice through their traditional beliefs and practices developing particular forms of lay heuristics to guide their decisions. Thus using the concept of health capital, they balanced the negative consequences of smoking against the positive ones of relaxing and reducing stress when resting by the campfire after herding reindeer. Similarly, they saw local fruit and berries as healthy and an essential part of their diet and gift-giving, whereas shop bought fruit was neither adapted to their way of life nor as healthy as their local produce.

While the Sami reindeer hunters adapted and modified expert advice on risk management, in other studies it appeared that there was a resistance to expert advice on risk. This is perhaps most evident in Lee's discussion of women who bottle rather than breast-feed. These women clearly recognised expert advice but found that it did not help them manage the challenges of their every day lives and did not translate into their own lived experience. In some cases, this resulted in either overt conflict or avoidance of contact with professionals but usually was accompanied by accounts of the ways in which the women's choice was presented as reasonable and morally justifiable. In Tulloch's account of his public engagement with risk debates following 7/7 there is also a concern to revisit dominant explanations of the events of 7/7 by resisting an ‘irrational terrorist’ account, and through his response to the use of his experience as a justification for anti-terrorist legislation.

Final comment

The articles in this Special Issue make an important contribution to our understanding of the ways in which individuals in contemporary western society make use of risk. It is clear that individuals are actively engaged in managing their everyday lives and that risk is one resource that they choose to use in this process. In particular, they invoke risk when there is an unexpected challenge to the normality of their everyday life, even their own continued existence. Being involved in a traumatic event which is sudden, unexpected and unforeseen, such as flood or a terrorist attack, exposes the fragility of everyday life. However, less dramatic and traumatic events can also provide a serious challenge such as the threat to a way of life or the need to account for behaviours which powerful others categorise as dangerous.

While experts with their specialist knowledge are a possible resource for making sense of and managing uncertainty, there was little evidence, with the possible exceptions of Tulloch's account, of their active use in managing uncertainty. Indeed the evidence tends to indicate resistance to expert assessment of and advice on risk as in Lee's account of bottle-feeding mothers. Individuals' response to uncertainty appears to be very much grounded in their own experiences and cultural perceptions and dispositions and can be seen as non-rational or based on in-between strategies. However such strategies do work. Indeed as Zinn points out, when expert predictions based on cognitive rationality are compared with non-expert predictions grounded in lay heuristics there is little evidence that experts are better at predicting the future. Non-rational and in-between approaches to risk and uncertainty do enable individuals to make sense of their world, to make decisions and to act. Whether they could or should make better decisions is another matter; for practical purposes such decisions are good enough.