Beyond the Hazard: The Role of Beliefs in Health Risk Perception
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article addresses how beliefs about health risks cluster and how these relate to perceptions of risk among Canadians. A principal components analysis conducted on items reflecting various beliefs from the Canadian National Health Risk Perception Survey extracted four underlying dimensions: Cancer Dread, Trust in Regulators, Environmental Concern, and Personal Agency. Factor scores were then used to investigate relationships between belief factors and the perceived health risk of various hazards with gender, education, income, and province of residence as covariates. Environmental and Therapeutic health risk perceptions were significantly higher in respondents with high Cancer Dread and high Environmental Concern, but lower in respondents with high Trust in Regulators. Environmental health risk perceptions were lower in respondents with high Personal Agency, whereas Social health risk perceptions were higher in respondents with high Cancer Dread and Personal Agency. Results suggest that information about health risk–related beliefs can be useful in improving our understanding of the public's perceived risk of health hazards.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".