Risk as a relational phenomenon: a cross-cultural analysis of parents’ understandings of child food allergy and risk management

Abstract

Western culture can be seen as permeated by risk-consciousness. In particular, parents are under scrutiny in their roles as risk managers. In this article, we address parental experiences of children more at risk than other children, children with food allergy, and the management of allergy risk in everyday life. Drawing on a notion of risk as ‘situated’ in local everyday life, we argue that a further exploration of parental understandings of child food allergy risk would benefit from an analysis of studies across different local contexts. In this article, we draw on a secondary qualitative cross-cultural analysis of interview data from several studies of parents in Sweden and Scotland through 2006–2010, which focused on parents’ understandings of the nature of food allergy and the children’s management of the allergy risk. We found some common themes in the different data sets. First, parents depicted food allergy as life-threatening, a ‘death risk’ lurking in the background, more or less constantly present in different everyday situations, amounting to an existential condition in parenting. Second, they talked about food allergy risk as a relational phenomenon, meaning that the risk emerged in the encounter between the young person’s individual competence to manage allergy risk and the understandings of allergy risk in others – thus depending on contexts and interaction between several actors. Finally, the analysis showed that unpredictability and risk in constant flux are the prominent aspects of living with food allergy. We also discussed the ways risk and trust are related, as well as how the involvement of others can be seen as both a risk and a safeguard.

Keywords:

• risk
• everyday life
• parents’ understandings
• child food allergy
• secondary qualitative cross-cultural analysis

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for a grant from the Swedish Asthma and Allergy Association, which, together with financial support from Södertörn University, made this study possible. We want to thank Professor Magnus Wickman at the Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, who headed the Swedish research programme Severe child food allergy: from diagnostic to practice’ at the Sachs’ Children and Youth Hospital in Stockholm and Dr Mirja Vetander at the Department of Clinical Science and Education, Karolinska Institutet, who recruited the parents and contributed to the data collection and analysis of the primary Swedish data. In Scotland, we are grateful to Professor Aziz Sheikh, who led the anaphylaxis research programme under the auspices of the University of Edinburgh Allergy and Respiratory Research Group. We would also like to acknowledge the important contribution of Dr Michael Gallagher and Nina Akeson, who conducted many of the original interviews and conducted the original data analysis, and Professor Sarah Cunningham-Burley and Janice Macleod, who were part of the research team. We are also grateful for the constructive advice provided by the two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Asthma and Allergy Association [F2013-0034].